


The Boy You Love, Part II/III

by Persephone



Series: Willing to Take the Risk [25]
Category: Valentine's Day (2010)
Genre: Bad Decisions, Canon Gay Character, Canon Gay Relationship, Confessions, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-18 08:52:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 37,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19331239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Persephone/pseuds/Persephone
Summary: Holden concludes telling his story. Here there be thorns.





	1. Holden Wilson

When Sean returned to LA the following January, something went wrong inside him. Having had time to think about it, that was the truest way he could describe it.

It wasn’t because he saw the bruises for the first time. That shocked him, no question. Faded though they already were, their presence all over Sean’s body—on his arms, chest, stomach and thighs—had hit him like a ton of bricks and had him— well, initially the sight had him staring in shock, sending so many things through his mind. Bizarre, difficult things, much too emotionally complex for a love newbie to understand, and likely contributing to his later problems. But it hadn’t been the bruises.

It had been the shock of separation. Seeing him physically, in the flesh, after months of getting turned inside out over the phone. It had been . . . too real somehow. Because he had never waited for anyone to come home, because he had never wanted so badly he could barely get out of bed some mornings, because he had never felt so powerfully a need that demanded total satisfaction, so many nights now, spent making absentee love that continually missed that mark, all emotions whipped into high winds at Sean’s seemingly sudden reappearance, it seemed a hurricane was battering through him. Demolishing to leave behind difficult sensations he had never experienced before and not stopping no matter what he tried. Basically, scaring him stupid.

The night of Sean’s return, those feelings were like a band across his chest. Something _not right,_ restricting his breathing yet seemingly the only thing holding him together.

Feeling pulled apart, wanting things he couldn’t even articulate, he resisted. And in resisting, he did crack in two.

It proved their worst year together.

—

About a month to Sean’s return in late January, he broke it off with Jacob.

Whatever else could be said about him, he respected monogamy. Pragmatism and expediency as artifacts, he suspected, of a father who, for all his faults, practiced what he preached. One affair at a time because there would be cleanup afterwards and why give Arthur Railings needless extra work. So while with someone, while he’d get—and send—his share of suggestive texts, he’d nevertheless get in line like everyone else and wait his turn, never interfering with anyone’s privacy. One at a time had worked well for him, and during those years with Sean, that was how he kept it.

Jacob, loving condescension, chose instead to tell him why he was calling it off.

_“Look, Holden, everyone knows what you’re like. You’re new to what I make you feel and I get that. I’m okay with it, I guess. I guess some other guy gets to reap the rewards of my work.”_

The small benefit lunch sponsored by the governor’s office had been a good place for a breakup. Jacob left him with a soft kiss on the lips, the way he’d taught him because it was how Sean kissed—a kiss, a soft smile into his eyes as if both confirming and affirming that he was real, then off for the morning run. With Jacob he just closed his eyes and pretended. After their breakup, the governor’s reelection committee, which Jacob headed, received a generous donation from Alastair Wilson, along with a glowing recommendation of Jacob’s political fundraising competence. Thus Jacob’s future opportunities were guaranteed and his own interest there was done.

The same day, Jacob sent him a thank-you message saying he was a great person and maybe they could “rekindle memories” one of these days. _Though for the sake of your single-use reputation, I won’t tell if you won’t,_ accompanied by a winking smiley emoji. When they had seen each other again soon after at Cavanaugh, he had offered his cheek instead for Jacob’s kiss.

After Jacob, he spent two weeks scrolling texts, nearly convincing himself that ending things with Jacob hadn’t been about the return of one famous quarterback. But scrolling backlogs of suggestive texts had quickly became like reading the same sentence over and over in a book he’d long since lost interest in. Body and soul, totally alien to him, he was waiting for just one guy.

One evening, after Christmas, while picking up takeout at Mr. Chow’s, enthralled by the maitre d’s telling of his great-grandmother’s migration from a village in the Chinese province of Guangzhou, escaping the hell of uncles meaning to sell her into sexual slavery by boarding a ship headed for the New World, and eventually establishing a business for herself as a seamstress in San Francisco during the 1849 gold rush, he got a text from Craig.

Craig was asking whether he was up for some _sightseeing._ Being Craig’s code for a certain type of party. Unable to pin down why there were butterflies in his stomach seemingly constantly these days, he figured why not. Maybe he just needed to get out of his own head. Dinner in hand, a tip to his server and an even bigger one to the maitre d’, because even if it were a made up tale, it was a really good one, he went home and nibbled on some of the delicious baby bok choy, then showered and met Craig at the newly opened private club . . . where he proceeded to behave like a census-taker instead of someone there to have fun.

Under the cool, sexy lighting, he could hear himself, going from strange to worse but unable to do anything about it. When he cordially asked the third, incredibly built, barely clothed guy to come smiling up to him—in a Swarovski crystalled New Year’s top hat and not much else—where he’d gone to college, Craig gently sent him home.

A week or so after New Year’s, on a business trip to Athens together, Craig accepted an invitation to an event in Istanbul. For which they hopped a fifty-minute private flight, and during which he psyched himself and Craig up, assuring Craig that what had happened in LA had been a fluke, some kind of funk, and wouldn’t repeat. 

And so at the Four Seasons on Craig’s suite balcony, overlooking a glittering Bosphorus, they hosted the before party, fully intending on bringing on the after party.

What happened instead was him having to sit out the main event, forget the after party, suddenly and genuinely feeling under the weather.

Laid out on his own suite’s sofa, feeling sickish, Craig stood over him watchfully, saying very little, while he shook his head and waved him off. Craig tipped his head observantly at him, then nodded in acceptance, and left him alone with butterflies crowding him.

Then Sean came home.

It was like, one minute he was living in the real, known world, the next he was flying.

The evening Sean returned, he stayed late at the office. Why? Well, because he had set himself up for questions with no immediate answers. No clue how any of it worked, when a football team released its players, he hadn’t known what to do except to wait.

With football season over, was the quarterback expected to stay later, until the rest of the team was dismissed? Or was that team captain. Was the quarterback automatically team captain? He knew this from high school. No, team captain could be anyone, the most capable and liked. So of course that was Sean. No, wait, that was just him being immature. Pro teams worked differently. Right?

_Jesus._

He’d avoided knowing the details of Sean’s life like the plague. Now that decision was coming back to haunt him.

Still, it felt right. Like something this good should be a little difficult to get. So he’d sat there appreciating the setting sun on his face. Whenever he thought back to that evening, as clear in his mind as a discarded jewel, it was the suspended waiting he remembered most.

Waiting because a month ago on the phone, Sean had offhandedly mentioned that if his team didn’t “break AFCs,” it would be third week of January, early evening, when he would get back into LA. So at the start of the week he’d asked his secretary Rachel to find out what AFCs were and what failing to break them meant. He’d assumed it was an acronym for something to do with . . . something, and had attended meetings hoping Sean’s team was failing to break it as hard as would get Sean back into Malibu as soon as possible.

Rachel had reported back that the American Football Conference championship was one of two championships in the NFL and that the San Diego Chargers had _not_ succeeded in qualifying for it.

“Two championships? Isn’t the championship the Super Bowl?” he asked, confused.

“The NFL’s Super Bowl contest is a final one derived from two conferences within the NFL, the American Football Conference, and the National Football Conference. Each conference contains sixteen teams, grouped geographically into four divisions. A northern division, an eastern one, and so on.”

“Really?” he asked, surprised. North, south, east and west? It sounded so basic. A lot less complicated than college football anyway.

Rachel continued. “Had the San Diego Chargers won their matchup this week, they would have _broken,_ ” she said delicately, her genteel tones air-quoting the word he had also had her demystify, which now seemed quite obvious, “into the AFC championship round to play the Seattle Seahawks.”

“Oh, okay,” he said. “So the San Diego . . . team . . . ”

“The Chargers . . .”

“So the Chargers _didn’t_ make it to the AFCs.”

“They did not,” Rachel confirmed.

He thanked her and she left, quietly closing the door behind her.

Which was how he came to be sitting there, on the evening of the 21st, waiting. As he’d been waiting since the start of the week. It was Wednesday. The western division matchup for the AFCs had been Sunday, days ago. How much longer could the team hold back the players, or the captain? It had to be tonight. So he was waiting.

A soft current seemed to be trailing along his skin, thrilling him ever so slightly. This time last year he hadn’t even met him. But he remembered what it had felt like to chase him—the newness of it. This year would be as exciting. Almost breathless, time standing still, he was noticing the smallest things: the cobalt blue field of the sigil of his cuff links, with its snow white lamb carrying the red cross banner of the Knights Templar, a gift from the CEO of a London real estate firm; the striking tones of the sun on the leather in his office, what had been holding his attention for minutes; the quiet, deeper way he was breathing at the thought of seeing him again. The imperceptible way the world had stopped to wait with him.

Looking out across the cityscape, he remembered thinking that none of it was real. Neither Alastair nor Cecelia Wilson knew about this. Arthur Railings didn’t know about it. His friends, definitely not. So it couldn’t be real. In a world full of known, meager, hard realities, he, Holden Wilson, had discovered an unknown.

Probably, he’d looked so stupid, sitting there feeling himself, not daring to move for fear of destroying an imaginary alchemy. One so delicate that even checking for missed calls or messages—Sean could have left one and he might have simply missed it—seemed sacrilegious. Sean would either be in LA tonight or he wouldn’t be. And if he wasn’t, he’d just wait again tomorrow.

At around a quarter to seven, he got Sean’s text saying he was home.

Immediately, he intercommed Rachel telling her she could go home. Then he was in his elevator, in his car, on the PCH failing to notice a spectral, violet twilight on the ocean, then in Malibu. All before his ears had stopped ringing from the notification on Sean’s text.

But suddenly he was with him. Standing just inside his front door, holding tightly to his arm. Almost unable to believe it had happened. And completely unprepared for the emotional onslaught.

He couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. After practically crashing through his front door and grabbing him, he was now immobile, his face turned away, trying to hide the unknown things, the hot, hard wind unexpectedly slamming through him. He didn’t even kiss him, and Sean didn’t force the moment.

What was happening, he remembered thinking, unable to relax his hold, in a million years not imagining that distressed was how he would feel. He should hug and kiss him welcome. But letting go would mean flying off in the story, scattered to pieces and never being able to find himself whole again. But he needed to let go, he was already scattered and he needed to pick up the pieces of himself he could see on the floor.

Instead he tightened his grip on him, weathering memories of the past empty months of having loved without him, and in holding him now, winning it all back. He hadn’t cried in twenty years, but now, incredibly, he wanted to cry. It felt alien and embarrassing, but he wanted to tell him that he loved him and had missed him and how could he have left him. They had been separated for _half a year_ and it wasn’t good or natural or right and what was he going to do about it?

But he couldn’t even look directly at Sean, who was staring at him, smiling. Patiently waiting.

Sean’s smile widened, his face shining with such happiness and pleasure that it squeezed the breath from him, making him feel even more disassembled. Finally, Sean wrapped an arm around him, pulling him close and making him look at him. “Hi beautiful,” Sean whispered. And even the sound of his voice not filtered through a connection felt almost too much. “I think we missed each other.” Slowly, Sean kissed the side of his nose, then stopped, their breaths mingling. “I’ve waited six months to do that,” Sean breathed against his lips, and sounded like he had. “Can I get some more?”

“Yeah, sure,” he remembered saying. 

His first words to him after six months. _Yeah, sure,_ as if Sean had asked to get past his aisle seat to use the bathroom. _What did I just say?_ he also remembered thinking, incredulously. But Sean had began softly kissing all over his face, like trying to eat him up.

Lastly, he remembered the vivid image of his soft-eyed secret up against the wall, where he had gently put him so he could see all of him, smiling as he obliged, blissfully gazing at him in obvious readiness for a lovely offseason. The look in his eyes had been like flashes of lightning through his heart.

As good a memory as he had, the rest of that first night of Sean’s return continued to remain a blur.

—

Once, in college, he and Elliot had laid on his dorm room bed looking at pictures of people who’d been struck by lightning. Flipping through the pages of an old Time Life magazine, they’d marveled at the evidence—burnt shoes, shirts and hats, stricken looking survivors. Elliot had queried whether it wasn’t all hoaxes, like pictures of the Loch Ness monster. But he’d been fascinated. Hoax or no, the sight of the crisped, darkened edges of loafers and baseball hats had hypnotized him. What would a charge like that feel like? Could a person really survive?

Yes. The answer was yes.

—

Days into Sean’s return, he was feeling worse. Something wasn’t right. He was waking up mornings feeling . . . ill. Like the sensations from Istanbul had expanded through him. Why would that be? For the first few days, of course, he wasn’t going to work even if Century City turned out to be the location of the second coming. But _days_ in, he should have been able to. Nine days after Sean’s return, he woke up and made himself.

He sat up and waited on the edge of the bed, for his stomach to settle. Sean was out running. He took small, uncomfortable breaths, then went into Sean’s kitchen to find some B-12 and folic acid concoction or other, sure to be there, then showered and left before Sean could return and wreck his focus.

Problem was, that was merely how his days started. Things only got worse from there. From the moment he woke up until the moment he was standing back in Sean’s living room on returning from work, he was awash in messed up sensations.

It would kick in at work, where his disquiet would settle even deeper. All day he was struggling with distracted, difficult thinking. Sean was home. So should he still be at his desk or in meetings starting out at the cityscape, as if someone was calling his name out there? Even if he could have explained away his disquiet as a form of distraction at Sean being home, Sean was home. All he had to do was drive to Malibu and ease his jitters. So what _was_ this?

Was it anger? It felt like anger, only because of how distracting it was, but he wasn’t angry about anything. Was it impatience? _Hunger?_ When he sat still too long . . . was it dizziness? Why did he feel . . . sick so much of the time. Like his heart was breaking.

Since Istanbul, Craig had held off inviting him to any more parties. Days after returning to work, Craig invited him to drinks with some mutual friends. Semi-work, really. But at day’s end, by Rachel’s desk, he’d glanced at Craig and shook his head.

“Still feeling off?”

As much as he would have loved to answer otherwise, he truthfully couldn’t. Craig nodded, encouraged him to feel better.

He didn’t. By day’s end he had to gear up for the other, real part of the problem. Each evening returning to Malibu, where problem grew, not lessened.

And it was because of aromatherapy. Of all things.

Done a little differently this early in Sean’s offseason, it still shouldn’t have, by any means, destabilized him. But six days after returning to work, he was also, embarrassingly, having to force himself to _stay_ at work until past six-thirty, aiming for more like a quarter to seven or something. Like an alcoholic promising himself when he could have a drink. Because he was having to force himself to give Sean the space for aromatherapy. It went like this.

Much to his surprise, on returning from playing football, Sean had a routine which Sean described simply as “regaining equilibrium,” and which was as innocent as it sounded. Weeks long, filled with plenty of touching and kissing, but little talk, Sean would sit typing at his laptop, clearing unread email correspondences and making entries into a journal he apparently kept there. Then there would be a lot of staring out at the ocean, or into bedroom closets with an eye toward spring cleaning. He’d heard of spring cleaning, but Sean actually did it.

But central to the process was aromatherapy. Every night, for several weeks. Having first entered Sean’s life months into Sean’s offseason last year, he’d missed this period. So in his experience, Sean’s aromatherapy had always been something done for a little while in the evenings. He hadn’t known that this initial period was so intense, went on for two hours or something, and that Sean took it as seriously as a religious event.

As with everything to do with candles and meditation, the notion of “regaining equilibrium” as Sean had described it had sounded pretty hokey to him. So the night Sean started, the very next day after returning to LA, he’d just accepted the Bluetooth headset Sean had handed him, along with his kiss, and laid back to watch a couple episodes of shows. Then in no time, it seemed, he was hitting pause as Sean was suddenly coming over him, blotting out the yellow overhead recessed lights, having finished what he was doing. When he had been in the house all day, aromatherapy had at most been background eye candy.

Having started work again, however, it had become a strange problem. Out of the house all day, then returning to find Sean still . . . not immediately available.

It . . . irked him.

No one had to tell him how bad that sounded. 

Sean said and did nothing to call his attention to his behavior, but Sean didn’t have to. Just a couple days in, he knew he _was_ acting like a drunk, talking too much and being a nuisance. It wasn’t that he was completely out of his mind; for the first few nights, on returning and finding Sean still at it, he’d silently moved through the living room, meaning to make his way to the bedroom to shower and give Sean time to finish.

And each night he’d crashed his shin hard into Sean’s awful glass side tables. Swearing reflexively, that first night he’d quickly whispered, “Sorry,” at Sean, before realizing he shouldn’t be speaking and interrupting the silence and had quickly vanished into the bedroom. Only to have Sean walk in moments later, eyes on him as if he’d never seen him before and what lovely miracle of chance had marooned him in there.

But it happened the following couple of nights as well, even though he kept an eye out for the side tables which were by no means invisible. Those times he had swallowed his reaction, not wanting to look like he was being passive aggressive or seeking attention or anything like that. When Sean had nevertheless opened his eyes and turned to him, he’d raised both hands apologetically, indicating that Sean just stay where he was. And then had gone into the bedroom. Those times, Sean had given it maybe another five minutes.

His solution then, had been to start coming in later.

But there he was on his sixth night back at work, a little after seven, standing in Sean’s living room observing Sean still in his position by the patio doors.

All the lights were off in the living room except for the dim yellow overhead ones, the ones which seemed to extend their glow only as far as was necessary during the most enjoyable nights, for him to look down and see whether Sean’s arousal was blushing along with the rest of him. Normally, he wasn’t a fan of overhead lighting, but these ones he quite liked.

Beyond their amber pools, flickering beeswax candles formed tiny halos all around them, dotting the darkness and pumping sandalwood—or maybe it was jasmine, or lavender—scents into the air. On an exercise mat on the dining room floor, before the sliding patio doors, Sean was seated cross-legged. Eyes closed, arms folded in his lap, breathing light enough to be asleep. Only the ambient sounds of surf and seagulls keeping him company.

His stomach twisted. He couldn’t stay any later at work. But . . . Sean needed this time. Maybe he should return home to his own place until this period was over. It would be the considerate thing to do.

But the thought only twisted his stomach further, sending confused, frustrated butterflies fluttering in all directions.

Why did he have to _wait_ any longer after having been away from him all day. He wanted him now, right when he walked through the door.

And why didn’t Sean get that? Didn’t Sean feel what he was feeling? Why didn’t Sean switch to doing this during the day when he was at work, or at least stop when he came home. Or just . . . let him come over so he wouldn’t feel so . . . ill. Also, hadn’t it been a couple of weeks already and wasn’t Sean healed or whatever by now?

So yeah. Those were the wonderful, mature thoughts he stood there having. Wondering who was this person standing there begrudging _aromatherapy_ for interfering with their time together. Who was this dangerous, hungry wolf.

He thought of returning to his car, letting his stomach settle. But likely hearing his chaotic thoughts, Sean slowly roused himself. Stretching his arms forward and flexing long and hard, Sean now turned and smiled at him.

“C’mere.”

“Why?” he asked, then heard himself. “I mean— it’s okay. I gonna jump in the shower. Take your time.”

“Come over here and put your arms around me.”

Warming all over, he didn’t immediately move, feeling bad that Sean was catering to him. Then he took off his suit jacket, draping it over a chair as he went. Maybe this was some new aspect of the process and he was in some serious luck. Sean swept a burning hot look over him as he approached, making him hard even before he was near. He got on the floor behind him, scooting up and pressing himself against Sean’s back. Sean laid back against him with a soft sigh, his arms draped on his knees. It wasn’t frustration or confusion he was feeling, he realized as he stripped off Sean’s T-shirt and Sean lifted his arms and gave him access. 

Holding him warm and close and blushing all over, while Sean lifted the hem of his trousers and slipped his fingers into his socks. Touching his nipples, his stomach, working his hand down into his joggers. Feeling him get so wet, grow so hard in his hand and drop his head against his shoulder, turning to breathe hotly against his neck. He kissed his mouth, slipped his tongue inside, pushing so far in that it seemed neither of them breathed unless he offered oxygen from his own lungs. Swallowing his soft grunts, groans that died in his throat, barely able to keep them in an upright position as Sean writhed, hard and warm against him, moaning his name and fucking his hand, lightly scratching his ankles and making him tighten all over, squeeze him harder.

It wasn’t anger, frustration or confusion. It was nausea.

—

Now he wasn’t just waking up mornings feeling ill, but also with a feeling of urgency.

He couldn’t swallow past an anguish that he would wake one morning to find him gone. That he would have forgotten that they had said goodbye. And then it would be another six months before he could be with him again, hold him again.

That low level panic from last year had been a cakewalk compared to what he was feeling now. On waking most mornings he was stopping himself from turning over on his side and curling up against the sickening sensations.

Separated again, his thoughts went, he’d be shoved back into an unkind world of seeing him only on TV, talking to reporters, smiling at them, getting touched by them whenever they conveyed their thanks. By his teammates when they showed their gratitude or support by patting him on the shoulder or on his ass. And by the men who would have his nights. The ones who would feel his body rocking against theirs—slowly, attentively, feel him sweat all over them, while he only got his voice over the phone. Wanting him and not being able to have him. The entire world would have him except him.

He experienced these thoughts like the strange plays that unfolded before full wakefulness. Eyes open, he’d stare out through the glass walls like a captive, not entirely sure of who he was anymore, and in waiting for answers, not knowing what would come. Eventually he would sit up, aware that it had just been some form of dreaming, knowing he wasn’t caught on the other side of a TV screen like some character in a Twilight Zone episode.

Years later, Allison explained it all to him—the sick feelings, the nausea, everything. And it had been so simple. Though frankly, what she had said had sounded more like fiction to him than anything people actually went through. Yet as with everything to do with Sean, fiction sounding or no, he had indeed experienced it, and just how she had described it.

Because he had so strongly denied the natural ways love flowed through the body and even the brain, she’d explained, instead of being able to simply enjoy Sean’s return, he had touched off the feelings that came with unrequited love.

Resentment, anger, grief, all coursing undefined through him.

Months after talking to her, he had come to believe her. Of course he had been punishing himself with a form of unrequited love. Unrequited simply because he had denied himself the natural next step in a relationship: a commitment. 

Irony, he had since learned, sometimes came a little too sweetly flavored, even for him.

No different from Sean, who did know, his heart had been craving exclusivity. Private, secured, theirs. A natural need to take things to the next level. 

That January should have been when they started talking candidly about their feelings for each other. About what was happening between them. About the kind of future they each saw for themselves—what support Sean might require from him, and the manner in which Sean would fit into his life. 

Easy, obvious. All the things blowing on the hot wind inside him, the massive pressure of emotions leaving him feeling like he had sustained internal damage, caught and examined. They’d been together a year now and had spent the last few months feeding each other dopamine over the phone. Under normal circumstances, it would have been a no-brainer. 

But he had never even acknowledged that he had fallen in love, much less that he was suffering from a severe lightning strike of _missing you._ Certainly, he hadn’t known that gifting himself unrequited love, falling in love and refusing it because the other person didn’t fit into his idea of an emotionally comfortable life, and he didn’t fit his own mold of a person who should even make a commitment, judgements that broke perfectly natural things, could sometimes—oftentimes—bring devastation. Not even in the long run, but to ordinary, daily life.

His emotions and behavior during that period were absolutely terrible. The hole inside him boring deeper, refusing to fill up, refusing him a day’s peace, he’d been jealous of the entire world—of other men, of Sean’s serenity, of the fucking air occupying the same space with Sean.

He was by no means the passive aggressive or destructive type, and what his ex-boyfriends would later turn into sport against him and Sean he would never do to anyone. But the havoc he went on to create for Sean, the callousness he wouldn’t have wanted to know he had in him, assured him that he already had. Love was plenty aggressive and destructive on its own without a need for explicit instruction.

And so, natural next step denied, Holden Wilson in love proceeded to raise hell.

*


	2. Stay

Days into Sean’s return, he was feeling worse. Something wasn’t right.

He was waking up mornings feeling . . . ill. Like the sensations from Istanbul had expanded through him. Why would that be? If Sean’s absence had been the cause of all that, then he should be feeling better. Yet he wasn’t. 

In a very short time, he got his answers.

For the first few days after Sean’s return, of course, he wasn’t going into work if Century City turned out to be the site of the second coming. But _days_ in, he should have been able to. But it wasn’t happening. 

On the ninth day, he made himself do it.

Sitting up, he waited on the edge of the bed for his stomach to settle. Sean was out running. He took small, shallow breaths, then went into Sean’s kitchen to find some B-12 and folic acid concoction or other sure to be there, then showered and left before Sean could return and wreck his focus.

Problem was, that was merely how his day started. Things only got worse from there. All day his disquiet would settle even deeper until he’d be struggling with distracted, difficult thinking. With Sean home, should he still be at his desk. or in meetings, staring out at the cityscape as if someone were out there calling his name? Even if he could explain it away as Sean at distraction being home, Sean was home. All he had to do was drive up to Malibu to ease his jitters. So what was this?

Was it anger? It didn’t feel like anger, with no heated irrationality; he could think perfectly clearly through it. Was it impatience? _Hunger?_ When he sat still too long, was it dizziness? Why did he feel . . . sick so much of the time. Like his heart felt funny.

Since Istanbul, Craig had held off inviting him to any more parties. A week after returning to work, Craig invited him to drinks with some mutual friends. Semi-work, really. But at day’s end, by Rachel’s desk, he’d glanced at Craig and had shaken his head.

“Still feeling off?”

Lip pulling, he shrugged a shoulder. Craig nodded, encouraged him to feel better.

But he didn’t. Because now it was day’s end and he had to face the companion piece to his scattered feelings. Now he had to return to Malibu and go through a standoff with . . . aromatherapy. Yup.

No one had to tell him it was crazy. He was living it.

Done a little differently this early in Sean’s offseason, such was the surprise awaiting him. It went like this.

On returning from playing football, Sean had a routine Sean described as “regaining equilibrium,” which was as innocent as it sounded. Weeks long, filled with plenty of touching and kissing but little talk, the process involved a couple steps. Generally, Sean sat at his laptop answering emails and things like that, and making entires into a journal he apparently kept there. Then there would be a lot of staring out at the ocean, or into bedroom closets with an eye toward spring cleaning. He’d heard of spring cleaning, but Sean actually did it.

Central to the process, however, was aromatherapy. Every night, for several weeks. Having first entered Sean’s life months into Sean’s offseason last year, he’d missed this period. So that in his experience, aromatherapy had always been something done for a little while in the evenings. He’d had no inkling that this initial period was so intense, lasting over two hours sometimes, and that Sean took it as seriously as a religious pilgrimage.

As with anything to do with scented candles and oils and meditation, the whole thing had sounded pretty hokey to him. So the night Sean began, the very next day after returning to LA, he’d just accepted the Bluetooth headset Sean had handed him, along with his kiss, and laid back to catch up on TV shows. Then in no time it seemed to him, he was hitting pause as Sean was suddenly coming over him, blocking out yellow, overhead recessed lights, having finished what he’d been doing. When he’d been home all day, aromatherapy had at most been background eye candy.

Having started work again however, it had become a strange problem. Out of the house all day and then returning to find Sean . . . not immediately available.

It . . . irked him.

Again, no one had to tell him how bad that sounded.

Not being out of his mind though, the first couple evenings on returning and finding Sean still at it, he’d simply gotten himself out of the way. Silently moving through the living room, he’d meant to make his way into the bedroom to shower and give Sean time to finish. And each night he’d crashed, shin-first and hard, into Sean’s awful glass side tables. 

Swearing reflexively that first night, he’d quickly whispered, “Sorry,” at Sean before realizing he shouldn’t be speaking and interrupting the silence and had quickly vanished into the bedroom. Only to have Sean walk in moments later, eyes on him as if he’d never seen him before and what lovely miracle of chance had marooned him there.

But it had happened the following couple of nights as well, even though he kept an eye out for the side tables which were by no means invisible. Those times he had swallowed his reaction, not wanting to look like he was being passive aggressive or seeking attention or anything like that. When Sean had nevertheless opened his eyes and turned to him, he’d raised both hands apologetically, indicating that Sean just stay where he was, and had gone into the bedroom. Those times, Sean had given it maybe another five minutes. 

His solution then had been to start coming home later. Out of respect and— well, not wanting to seem like an out of control drunk.

But there was now, in Sean’s living room just a little after seven, observing Sean still in his position by the patio doors.

All the lights were off in the living room except for the overhead ones, the dim yellow ones that extended their glow only as far as was necessary, on the most enjoyable nights, for him to look down and see whether Sean’s arousal was blushing along with the rest of him. Normally, he wasn’t a fan of overhead lighting, but these ones he quite liked. But tonight all they showed him was irritating.

Beyond their glow, flickering beeswax candles formed tiny halos all around the living room, dotting the darkness and pumping sandalwood—or maybe it was jasmine, or lavender—scents into the air. On an exercise mat on the dining room floor, Sean sat seated cross-legged before the sliding doors. Eyes closed, arms folded in his lap, breathing lightly enough to be asleep. Only ambient sounds of surf and seagulls keeping him company.

His stomach twisted, without him even understanding why this was . . . frustrating to him.

Not because he couldn’t stay later at work or return to his condo until this period was over. But because . . . why should he come home and have to wait any longer after having been away from him all year. Shouldn’t they be able to have each other right when he walked through the door?

Why didn’t Sean get that? What was Sean thinking? Didn’t Sean feel the same way he did? Or why not switch to daytime when he was at work. Also, it had been a couple of weeks already, wasn’t Sean cured or whatever?

So yeah. Those were the mature and purportedly sane thoughts crowding him each evening when he came home. Butterflies scattering in confused, frustrated directions while he stood there begrudging _aromatherapy._

This wasn’t him, his dangerous, hungry wolf. He told himself to stop it.

Likely hearing his chaotic thoughts, Sean roused himself. Slowly, Sean stretched his arms forward, flexing long and hard. Then Sean turned and smiled at him.

“You look like dinner.”

“Have— have you had any?” he blurted, trying to calm his jittery stomach. The sight of him was distracting and he didn’t know why. Sean was always easy on the eyes but what was this vague anxiety now when he looked at him. Why did he feel crazy?

“Have I had dinner? No.” Sean blinked slowly at him. “Come over here and put your arms around me.”

Warming all over, he gladly went. Maybe this was some new aspect of the process and he was in for some serious luck. Discarding his suit jacket along the way, he caught the hot look Sean swept over him as he approached, making him hard even before he got near. He sat on the floor behind him, scooting up and pushing his arousal against Sean’s back. Sean laid back against him with a soft sigh, his arms draping over his knees. 

It wasn’t frustration or confusion, he realized as he stripped off Sean’s T-shirt and Sean raised his arms and gave him total access. Holding him warm and close, and blushing all over, Sean came back against him, slipping his fingers under the hem of his trousers and into his socks. 

Touching his nipples, his stomach, working his hand down into his joggers, he caught his breath as Sean melted against him. Feeling him get so wet, grow so hard in his hand and drop his head against his shoulder, turning to breathe hotly against his neck as he gently trailed his fingers over his cock. He kissed his mouth, slipped his tongue inside, pushing so far in that it seemed neither of them breathed without the oxygen from his own lungs. Swallowing his soft groans rising from his throat, somehow keeping them upright as Sean writhed against him, moaning his name and fucking his hand, lightly scratching his ankles and making him tighten all over and squeeze him harder.

It wasn’t anger, frustration or confusion. It was nausea.

—

The nausea brought with it a deeply weird feeling of . . . urgency. That was what had been distracting him at work and since Sean’s return. 

An anguished urgency that had settled in and which he couldn’t reason past, that he would wake up one morning to find him gone. That he would have forgotten that they had said goodbye and then it would be another six months before he could be with him again, hold him again.

The low level panic from last year had been a cakewalk compared to what he was feeling now. On waking most mornings, he was stopping himself from turning over on his side and curling up against the sickening sensations.

Separated again, his thoughts ran, he’d be shoved back into an unkind world of seeing him only on TV—talking to reporters, smiling at them, getting touched by them whenever they conveyed their thanks. By his teammates, when they showed their gratitude or support by patting him on the shoulder or on his ass. And by the men who would have his nights. The ones who would feel his body rocking against theirs—slowly, attentively, feel him sweat all over them—while he only got his voice over the phone. Wanting him and not being able to have him. The entire world would have him except him.

He experienced these thoughts like the strange plays that unfolded before full wakefulness. Eyes open, he’d lie staring out through the glass walls like a captive, not entirely sure of who he was anymore and in waiting for answers, not knowing what would come. Eventually he would sit up, aware that it had just been some form of dreaming. Knowing he wasn’t caught on the other side of a TV screen like some character in a Twilight Zone episode.

Years later, Allison explained it all to him—the anguish, the urgency, the nausea, everything. Although, frankly, to him what she’d said had sounded more like fiction than anything people actually went through. Yet as with everything to do with Sean, fiction sounding or no, he had experienced it just as she’d described. And it was so simple.

Because he had so strongly denied the natural ways love flowed through a body, and even a brain, she’d explained, instead of being able to enjoy Sean’s return, he had touched off the feelings that came with unrequited love.

Resentment, anger, grief, all coursing undefined through him.

In the months since talking to her, he’d come to fully believe her. Of course it had been a form of unrequited love he’d been punishing himself with. Unrequited because he _had_ denied himself that natural next step for two people in love: any kind of commitment at all.

Irony, it seemed, could come a little too sweet, even for him.

No different from Sean, who had known what was happening, his heart had been craving exclusivity. Private, secured, theirs. A basic need to take things to the next level. That January should have been when they started talking candidly about their feelings for each other. About what was happening between them and about the kind of future they each saw for themselves—what support Sean might require from him, and the manner in which Sean would fit into his life. 

Easy, obvious. Everything blowing on the hot wind inside him caught and examined. They’d been together a year now and had spent the last few months feeding each other dopamine over the phone. Under normal circumstances, it was a no-brainer.

But he had never even acknowledged that he had fallen in love. How much less that he was suffering from after-effects of a severe lightning strike of _missing you._ Refusing all of it because the other person didn’t fit into his idea of an emotionally comfortable life, and he didn’t fit into his own mold of a person who should make a commitment. Bad judgements breaking perfectly ordered things.

The result was that his behavior that year was absolutely terrible. And deep inside he worried it might have actually crossed into _unforgivably_ so. Certainly, he hadn’t known that gifting oneself unrequited love sometimes—oftentimes—brought devastation to daily life.

He was by no means the passive aggressive or the destructive type, and what his exes would later turn into sport against him and Sean he would never do to anyone. But the havoc he went on to wreak for Sean, the callousness he wouldn’t have wanted to know he had in him, had showed him something different. That love was plenty aggressive and destructive without a need for explicit instruction.

So, natural next step denied, Holden Wilson in love proceeded to raise hell.

—

Sixteen days after Sean’s return was a weekend. Early February.

Waking, he performed his new morning ritual. Sitting on the edge of the bed, staring out at the vast blue sky, he was watching pieces of himself drifting on a wind. Rising and falling, floating to an unknown destination. _Who are you, and what are you doing here?_

Sean’s hand was on his naked back, slowly tracing a pattern. Weaving spells maybe.

“Does it bother you that I can’t go out with you?”

He looked over his shoulder at him. They had just performed the most spectacular sixty-nineing he had ever experienced. A year in, he’d accepted that he would never get better sex than what happened between them. Seriously, would he have ever guessed that he needed to feel Sean’s thighs brushing his hair while he had him in his mouth to truly know paradise? Some guys were great at certain things, but he honestly couldn’t say whether Sean was great at sexying everything up or whether their chemistry just somehow worked magic on him.

Right then however, he didn’t understand why Sean was asking such a question. Sean wasn’t asking about being seen together in restaurants like philanthropic or business partners. 

He shook his head. “Definitely not.”

“You’re sure.”

Asked so softly. He nodded. 

How could he have known that for Sean that seemed their only obstacle. Still staring at him, he began noticing something. Where previously Sean would sometimes seem guarded, now there was nothing but openness. Sean was staring at him with a pure, naked love, soft eyes up in smoke and nearly as grey as the pillows. He’d never seen anything like it.

Yet he did know what it was, having seen it enough times in men’s eyes to recognize it, though normally he tried to be gone well before this stage. Even though Sean had spent the last few months leaving _I love you_ messages on his phone, face to face, Sean had only ever said the words a couple of times. But now he was seeing it clear in Sean’s eyes. 

Coupled with the question, it was a clearly signaled transmission—the desire for a next step.

Funny that he was able to recognize it in Sean but not in himself. Sugar sweet irony with honey on top.

That morning he hadn’t responded one way or another to Sean’s cues, seeing as it was taking most of his mental energy just coping with the hurricane hurling debris inside him. But because of his answer, it seemed to Sean that they had gotten on the same path.

Later that evening, Sean took a first step on that path.

Meaning to catch up on Grey’s Anatomy, on which he was constantly half a season behind and always getting spoilered, Sean’s Netflix account first recommended a viewing of the movie _Pretty Woman,_ a movie he personally disliked.

“Hey,” Sean said from behind him, at the dining table. “You press play on that and I'll come right over.”

Unsurprised, he couldn’t even shake his head. Of course Sean would like the movie. But because Sean normally lingered as along as possible at an invitation to watch his show with him, even though Sean could spend an entire cooking session listening to him detail the twists and turns, he told him he was on and pressed play.

So they watched that first, and afterward, while he began yawning, realizing he’d only be able to get through one episode tonight, Sean quietly asked his opinion on what they had just seen.

Irritated, he paused, parsing a reply. It was always so predictable. How many times had this happened with men he’d dated. Because he couldn’t relate to the movie— _Don’t you see?? You’re Edward!_ —he was somehow defective. Except that he lived in the real world, and no, that wasn’t how the Edwards, or the Alastairs, of the world behaved.

Upset to be in this space with Sean, he replied testily. “ _What_ did we just see?”

Lying between his legs, facing the TV and not him, but no doubt hearing sprinkles of hostility, Sean left it. Stayed silent.

But while Sean gave it no apparent further thought, it haunted him.

Was that really what Sean wanted? For him to drop his entire life and commit to fiction? Sean couldn’t be serious. And did Sean really believe this stuff? Didn’t anyone wonder why there was no sequel to the movie? Of course no one wanted to see the bitter marriage, and then part three, the venomous divorce.

Where was this coming from anyway? Sean had shown no indication of this last year. At this point he though Sean understood their relationship. Why go there now, when they’d reached such a good place?

On like that. Ignoring his own discomforts, placing blame elsewhere. All while continuing to get sexually wrecked on the shore that was Sean Jackson.

That Monday at work, taking a meeting with Tani, their head of media and a rep from a magazine wanting to do a feature on the firm, he looked up across the lobby and his jitters quietly coalesced.

While the rep placed a call for an answer to a concern they had, he looked up from the copy Tani was concerned about to stare directly at the several giant, bright red, heart-shaped balloons floating over the receptionists’ area. It was Valentine’s Day soon.

The lobby was actually very well done, the receptionists considering holiday decorating among their most valuable skills. Red-gold chocolate boxes on side tables, occurring with small red display cards bearing bold statements of love and commitment that awaited any stray placement of hand. Near which again and again, he would find himself withdrawing his hand as if to avoid a sting. His personal aversion to the period, he’d long suspected, had probably set an annual office challenge for what ideas could be most egregious. Even the cushions on the lobby couches were replaced with soft little heart-shaped ones that all their visitors loved.

That afternoon he was staring at the decorations because this was about the time of year he made plans to skip town. But he hadn’t yet.

If he spent Valentine’s Day with Sean, wasn’t that basically it? 

To be fair, he had no idea what Sean's feelings were on the holiday. Sean could dislike it as much as he did, for all he knew. Although somehow he doubted that. More importably, though, he shouldn’t stick around to find out, that being an opening he’d learned never to give.

Yet here he was, still in town. He couldn’t even wait to get back to Malibu so his stomach could settle. How the hell then was he supposed to leave town?

But whether he liked it or not, Sean had begun making cow eyes at him and hinting from movies that _it_ was on. Sean was probably only seconds from saying it, whatever _it_ actually was. Likely something neither of them could easily walk back. If Valentine’s Day didn’t bring _it_ out of people, nothing did.

Transfixed by the floating hearts gently bumping into each other—such a painful looking metaphor; he couldn’t understand how no one seemed to notice that—he realized with that neat coalescence that a problem was on its way. 

He _had_ to leave.

He sat with the thought, hardly believing how sick it made him feel. He wanted to stay. For the first time he could remember, he did. But Sean was making it so . . . _difficult._

_It’s not him,_ he suddenly, and very clearly, realized. _It’s you. Something’s off with you._

Eyes on those hearts insistently bumping, he listened to his own advice. Then shifted his eyes to Tani, on the other side of the rep, but Tani had his head down and was very obviously pretending to ignore him. And by the time the rep finished his call, setting down his phone and informing them that their concern had already been taken into consideration and proceeded to explain, he knew he needed to handle his personal life just as efficiently.

But, he thought the following morning, dressed for work but staying across the length of the dinning room, no behaving badly this time. No acting weird until Sean kicked him out, no leaving notes without an explanation and bringing Sean to confront him at his own front door. Upfront and clean this time.

Sean was in the kitchen, preparing them breakfast. And he told him, concisely, that he was returning to the Westside for . . . a little while.

Unaware, of course, of what Sean had seen of his activities while on his side of town, he watched, confused and anxious, as Sean slowly, almost violently, paled.

“ _What?_ ”

Sean was looking at him as if at an apparition. To him, it seemed to him an overreaction. After all, last summer Sean had calmly shown him the exit the moment he’d tried to configure their fall communications. And Sean’s invitation to come back had been equally calm. What was different here?

“I’ll— be back. I just— I've got travel coming up— and . . .”

Sean continued looking stunned. So he too stopped, wondering what he was missing. Trying not to shift uneasily where he stood at the bedroom door, surprised Sean couldn’t hear the high-pitched whistle of hundred mile per hour winds inside him.

“What the fuck,” Sean said quietly, almost a whisper. “I thought we were past this.”

“Past what?” he asked. “Me having to travel for work?”

“For a month?”

“What?”

“Are you,” Sean asked, enunciating every word, “traveling for a month?”

“No. No, but— I mean—”

Sean began flipping off burners, making a contained racket that shouted his anger for him. An iron skillet got pushed aside, then Sean was gripping the edge of the counter, leaning forward, head down. His hands were even paler than his face.

Sean closed his eyes, his body still as if he was meditating. Or in prayer.

“Why won’t you stay?” Sean asked, as if to himself. “I asked if it was a problem and you said no. I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know what else to say to make you stay.”

“Make me stay?” he repeated, stridently. The bedroom wall suddenly seemed to be pushing up against his back. “Why can’t I leave? Who said I couldn’t?”

Sean said nothing, kept his eyes closed.

It all seemed so needlessly possessive. How were they back here? Yes they were attracted to each other but how did that make it the end of the world?

It was on the tip of his tongue to ask Sean what the big deal was. Okay, so he didn’t date in LA, but he was pretty sure it didn’t translate into him lacking company. Probably if Sean wanted, Sean could have half an NFL team down there before he even got out of Malibu.

Thank God he didn’t say it.

But he had to leave. It was all he knew. Standing there projecting calm was taking all his effort. It was hard catching a breath just looking at him.

It was getting harder holding back the bad-idea things he desperately wanted to say during sex. Talk about things he couldn’t walk back. Did Sean want his life ruined? Because part of him was begging to go ahead and do it, mess up both their lives and who cared as long as he got what he kept coming here for.

He felt unhappy and confused and just wanted to be himself again. To feel self-control again. To do only because he wanted to and to stop when he said so. Every person had that right.

“Holden . . . ”

“Wait, but why can’t I leave?” he insisted. “Are we getting married or something?”

“It’s been a year,” Sean replied as insistently. “You’re feeling the same things I’m feeling, I know you are. So what is this? We’re _going_ somewhere.”

He raised his eyebrows, asked sharply, “Where, exactly?”

Sean said nothing, turned his head away.

“The easiest way we do this,” he went on. “The right way, is if we don’t start guessing each other’s feelings. Giving each other roles without consent. I’ve never asked anything of you, and I’ve never given you reason to think I’m offering you something I’m not.”

Sean kept his face averted, his posture still as stiff.

“If you want to say something to me, Sean, something I should know about us, now’s the time to say it.”

“What I want is for you to leave.”

“But not like this. We have no reason to be fighting. I’ll— I’ll be back soon enough.”

“Holden, I'm breaking up with you. Leave my house.”

He stood still, staring in confusion. “What?”

This didn’t feel like last summer when Sean kicked him out. That time Sean had looked straight at him and his sentiment had been _We’ll see each other soon._

Now Sean looked . . . he didn’t know this look.

“Breaking up?” he repeated, as if he’d never heard the phrase before. “You don’t mean that. Why would we be breaking up? Nothing’s happened. We can’t— just— not see each other again.” _Why not? He doesn’t owe you anything._ “By breaking up, you mean— No. There’s no call for that. I'll be back soon.”

Nothing from Sean.

“Sean, you just got back into LA.”

Nothing.

“We have _six months_ to be together.”

No reaction.

“We can talk when I get back. I’ll— I’ll call you then.”

Sean straightened, turned to the cooker and slowly began relighting the burners. Sean had been making breakfast for two, a stack of blueberry cracked wheat waffles sitting on a second plate. Now Sean picked up the plate and dumped the waffles in the trash. Flicked off the coffeemaker, Sean didn’t drink coffee for breakfast, and casually tossed the jar of fancy maple syrup that existed in the house only because of him straight in after the waffles.

He quietly left.

—

Boarding his flight that afternoon, he walked slowly, eyes on his phone. Twenty days was all it had taken this year. The night before, he’d ordered flowers to be sent to Sean’s house—yeah, not obnoxious or anything—accompanied by a note apologizing for upsetting him. 

As they’d announced boarding, he’d sent Sean a follow up text. Now he waited for the delivery checkmarks to appear and walked right into the woman ahead of him when a notice came instead that his number had been blocked.

The woman turned around and offered him a conciliatory smile. Then her smile and she held out a hand to him. “Are you okay?”

“I’m okay,” he said quickly, staring at her. “I—” but he stopped, blinking at her. “It’s nothing. Thank you.”

She broadened her smile and entered the cabin. Behind her, he handed his suit jacket to the flight attendant, who smiled and said, “Welcome aboard, Mr. Wilson. Please call if you need anything.”

He nodded, not really hearing her. Down the aisle, he sat down in a slightly stunned state. Staring sightlessly toward the front of the cabin. Then he lowered his head.

He couldn’t believe how embarrassed he felt.

*


	3. Spend & Expend

“Will you be attending mom’s luncheon on Thursday?”

Picking up a crostini, he wished they were home. Alvarez would surely have hooked him up with extra goat cheese. Scoping the little glob that came on the truffle cranberry bread, however, he accepted that some people just didn’t get what it took to truly rock a palate, in this case, extra goat cheese, and just ate the crostini as it was. Waiting for his father to answer his question, he continued maintaining a casual air.

The Bel-Air’s private dinning room was quiet tonight, being later than the retired set usually ate dinner. Appetizers had already been served, yet his father was still on his iPhone reading the email he’d sent him earlier. Now Alastair looked over the rim of his glasses at him. There was a long pause before he got an answer.

“Why?” his dad asked.

Munching on the crostini, he stopped and sent a look across the table. At the man who nearly unfailingly attended all his ex-wife’s functions as part of his philanthropic calendar, as she did his. In fact he suspected it was part of their divorce settlement. 

“ _Why?_ ” he asked back.

“No, I meant,” his father replied, impatiently. “Why are you asking?”

“I can’t ask?”

“Well, it’s a little curious to ask something you already know the answer to. And seeing as you haven’t seen her in over a month, maybe it’s guilt. Are you asking to join me?”

“ _What?_ ” he interjected. “Guilt? Why would she say that?”

His father took a long, tranquilizing breath. Put aside his phone, removed his glasses. Now the neglected table napkin was picked up and laid over a crossed knee, and without another word, his dad picked up a crostini and began to eat.

Having replayed what his dad had actually said, meanwhile, versus what his mind had whispered hotly at him, he quietly retreated his fervor into a corner.

After the crostinis were gone, including having eaten one of his dad’s, and after their table had been cleared, Alastair said placidly, “Is everything all right?”

“I’m fine.” He was staring at the wine bar past his father’s shoulder. Now he brought his gaze back and watched him sip a small ruby Negroni. “Did you find everything in there?” he asked, nodding at the iPhone on the table.

“Yeah,” Alastair said after a beat, having noted the change of topic. Their main course was now brought and served. Eyes on the motion of the plates coming down and being arranged, he pretended he wasn’t also noticing his father’s even closer scrutiny of him. When their servers told them to enjoy their meal and left, he picked up his cutlery while his father said, “It’s been a while since you came by for the weekend. Are you free Saturday?”

“What for?”

Alastair shrugged off his suspicious tone. “Oh, I don’t know, Griff Kerkorian is having a father-son bocce ball tournament, and I thought you might enjoy lobbing hard plastic balls at Tyler’s head again, like old times.”

Despite himself, he laughed. “Now _that’s_ been a while.”

“You promised, and did quit, your last year of grad school. Though I think Tyler still marvels at your zero for one hundred attempts.”

“One hundred and thirteen,” he said, smiling, remembering. “Tempting. Very tempting.”

Alastair chuckled, shaking his head, and they ate in silence for a while. Occasionally, he snuck a look across the table and wondered what his father would say if he told him everything wasn’t all right. In a million years he wouldn’t of course, not over this. Not when Alastair’s ridicule over Ian still rang clear as glass chimes in his ears. 

But . . . couldn’t his dad see that something major had happened to him? Shouldn’t a father be able to see it even if his son didn’t want him to? This was going on his second year seeing the same guy. He really didn’t seem different?

Well, that was good. Because ultimately he _wasn’t_ different. And he _was_ fine. Since leaving Malibu, things had only gotten better, though gradually. He woke mornings feeling great—no jitters, no indeterminate sense of anguish. Got dressed feeling same. Went to work in the same state, spending the whole day without moments of distress. Sure, things didn’t feel entirely kosher inside him. Evenings were especially hard. But he was making and spent the time relaxing at home or with friends. So overall, things were positive. Like he’d stopped eating food he was allergic to.

Two weeks ago, Sean had done him a favor. He’d needed to leave Malibu and not on the weak terms he’d been ready to grant himself. He’d needed a door slammed in his face and Sean had done just that. Hardly anyone like looking in the mirror over certain things, but it never bothered him. Truly, he was grateful.

On returning from his trip and finding his number still blocked, but head cleared from the forced distance, he’d realized he could email.

_You’re one in a million,_ he’d written honestly. _I'm not even one in ten. I know it because I can’t give you what you want._

In his father’s presence, while Alastair talked about the scholarships behind Thursday’s luncheon, he found himself lowering his eyes, nodding as he listened, but hiding the shame he felt over his inability to quit Sean Jackson. Worried that his weakness would show in his eyes.

But he shouldn’t consider it a weakness that he had taken a positive step in relationship management. Horribly delicious sex and enjoying each other’s company to the point of distraction weren’t reasons enough to selfishly hang around and ruin a guy’s life. Leading him on when their expectations were night and day.

However, emailing wasn’t management. He needed a real way of managing both himself and Sean, and it began with stopping all these emotions from running the show. He was doing fine now, but if Sean called right then he’d be outta there and in his car before his napkin hit the table.

He inexplicably had a fire raging for Sean Jackson. There was no getting around that, and being blocked felt like a hand to his throat. But this year he would figure it out. Because he _wasn’t_ fourteen anymore and didn’t need Alastair’s advice on what he should be doing about boys he liked.

Anyway, the email had been two weeks ago and Sean hadn’t replied. So here he was having dinner with his dad, assured that if his father didn’t see anything different about him, then there was nothing different.

—

Generally, he stayed out of his mother’s way as much as he could. But that Thursday, he was at her luncheon.

After politely kissing her ex-husband, she looked at him and flushed with pleasure. She occasionally did, especially if it had been a while and he hadn’t done anything to vex her in the meantime. That afternoon she held him by the shoulders and smiled at him, giving him air kisses so warm he almost felt her cheek against his.

It used to be her standard, actually, back before he left for college. Since then however, what little affection she did show him felt ingratiating. After long post-divorce years of dodging questions about his dad between cold courses following such displays, he’d learned to be wary of her motives. She’d since outgrown such moves, but old trepidations died hard.

But on that occasion he was her happy and willing arm adornment. Smiling for Getty Images, finding her dainty jokes funny and enjoying all of her caterer’s choices.

That afternoon and at several more functions she had that spring. Her garden parties, he attended. Her cocktail hours, he showed up for. Sometimes alone, sometimes with a date, exciting her crazy friends. It never occurred to him that those women were keeping up with his dating life until, engaged to Sean, he overheard their snark in his mother’s formal dining room. Beyond her parties, he even attended a couple of her routine foundation meetings, raising her eyebrows but generating no comment.

As with his father, he had no idea whether mothers sensed when things were awry with their children. But during that spring and summer, needing so strongly to recognize his self-identity, he gravitated toward her no less. If she or his father wondered at any of it, neither indicated.

—

Days after returning from his Valentine’s Day travel, he’d lunched with some industry colleagues.

Shock from being blocked retreating, by then he’d found solace in deep self-justification and it had turned out to be quite the plate of armor. A couple mornings after returning, Craig glimpsed him and gave him a second look, then a favorable smile. He was back to normal. 

And at the lunch that afternoon, he did feel normal.

His friends had shown up with a guy he didn’t know but whom he soon suspected had been brought along for matchmaking purposes. Sherrod, African-American, very much a geek—head of IT at someone’s bank and full of top quality security info—and lunching in a Zenga suit he could stare at all day. Sherrod also came with a sweet, soft-eyed smile. Like Sean’s.

Obviously he hadn’t thought that. He’d just— noticed it. Sherrod was nice; thoughtful and listened well. And didn’t hit on him. Also all reminding him of Sean.

Honestly though, he hadn’t been in the mood for dating. It had been taxing enough just typing Sean’s email address in the To line of the email. So he’d taken no numbers at the lunch, although he’d told Sherrod, maybe one too many times, that it was nice meeting him. Anyway, his friends had the number he gave out for dating.

Between the lunch and spending time with his parents, and when he did call Sherrod, he let work and friends take over. Petey took him sexy Mexican R&B dancing, Craig took him sinning, though he gave himself a buffer by requesting viewing-only venues for the time being, and Elliot gave him the home comforts of TV nights and cozy rooftop-patio gossip. Elliot’s rooftop was among the most beautiful spaces in the entire city and he was never anything but happy and in love with his best friend up there.

Gradually, the hand at his throat eased up.

He continued checking his email for a reply, but almost three weeks later, Sean was still off the air.

Nearly a month after Sean had kicked him out and blocked him, he called up Sherrod. Within a couple of dates, he realized what he’d been doing wrong with Sean all along.

It happened while seated on tall cafe stools around a tiny table in West Hollywood. Upstairs on an outdoor balcony, under which a steady stream of happy, yelling, groping, already drunk twenty-somethings poured by, screaming their love for each other and all sorts of things they would sober up and regret years on. Reminding him fondly of young days with Elliot. Whereas, he and Sherrod above, sat devouring giant submarine sandwiches and discussing the more staid and mature subject of sub tastiness.

Swallowing a mouthful, he smiled. And said, “I have to tell you. I’m very glad I made the call to Gerry.”

“Listen,” Sherrod replied. “Let me tell you. When Gerry called saying we were having lunch with Holden Wilson, I had to light a candle to the GQ style guru who had assured us all that paying three months salary for a Zenga suit would be worth it one day.”

Laughing, especially because Sherrod did look a little shellshocked, he said, “Wait, so people can still afford a subscription _and_ buy a suit?”

“ _Right?_ ” Sherrod sighed, wiping away an imaginary tear. “And three months’ salary for a suit? That’s officially an engagement ring. Now I gotta ask that suit to marry me.”

He was laughing himself breathless. And thinking only Sean made him laugh this much over nothing. Yet here he was doing so without Sean in sight. And without feeling like he was being singed by lightning.

And so it suddenly struck him.

Why he felt so intensely, so wildly about Sean.

It was because he bottled up absolutely everything inside him and saved it only for him.

He paused, keeping his eyes on the sandwich on the plate.

Was it really that easy? Yes, it had to be.

Outside a small circle of close friends, he never let his guard down much with the men he dated. It was why Oliver had had the gall to tell him he didn’t talk much and had some kind of impenetrable shell, when he prided himself on being a great conversationalist. During his childhood, twelve or thirteen, he used to have his parents in stitches challenging them on stories about their own daily adventures, he used to call them. But to an extent, Oliver had been right. Most of his dates or boyfriends knew next to nothing about him. And in fact, these days, perfect strangers knew what could make him laugh better than most of them. Because life had changed quite a lot since he’d been a kid. Why bother getting to know anyone when they’d be gone soon anyway?

But for whatever reason, with Sean he dropped all barriers. And as importantly, he allowed himself to enjoy every moment of it. Laughed openly at whatever he liked, talked about whatever he liked. Storyfied like when he was young and carefree, for his enchanted audience of one, all the interesting things he saw all day and over which he knew most of his dates would return glazed eyes over. And that was if they were being nice about it. But with Sean he didn’t worry about seeming weird or off. He gripped Sean’s belt buckle and gabbed embarrassingly stupid things in Sean’s face and got big hickeys for it. With him he wasn’t even self-conscious about being physically uncoordinated. He ate a bunch of experimental home cooking, let himself enjoy the quiet they somehow generated in each other’s company, and with no self-censorship in play, he let himself do whatever he liked doing during sex.

Of course it was going to seem mind-blowing. Crazy and intense and uniquely exciting. Maybe even magical.

Yet all those things were present inside him right now, with Sherrod and without Sean in his life.

Maybe it was a phase he was going through in which he was craving more variety in his relationships. And somehow Sean had come along and triggered it. It made sense, right?

Which meant the answer to his condition was to start dating differently. Instead of bottling himself up, he needed to let himself out.

He needed to _expend_ his feelings for Sean on his dates.

Now he stared at Sherrod. Why the hell hadn’t he thought of this before?

Sherrod was holding up the wax-paper wrapped remainder of his sub. “This was pretty much perfect. You know what it was missing, though?”

Excited at his comprehension, nearly speechless, he smiled at Sherrod. “A dance number?”

Sherrod broke into short laughter, shook his head. “Okay, yes. But . . . something else.”

“So you tell me.”

“It was missing chocolate sauce.”

“Chocolate sauce?” he said, intrigued. “On a sweet chipotle?”

“Yes, boss.”

“I think we should try that,” he said, raising a finger at their server.

“You’re gonna do it?”

“You think I shouldn’t?” he asked urgently.

Sherrod swallowed laughter, shaking his head in disbelief as the server came over and he went ahead and asked for chocolate dipping sauce. Grinning, their server went off to get them some.

“You’re gonna try it with me, right?”

“Uh, yeah,” he said, laughing. “I’m not sitting here and watching you eat a chocolate chipotle sandwich without me. Why would you even say that.”

Sherrod beamed a sweet, soft, smile at him, breaking his heart into a wild gallup, as if he were being handled physically. Smiling, he mentally shook images of that other soft-eyed smile from his head.

But their chocolate sauce arrived, and after drizzling some on the portion of sandwich Sherrod cut for him, they independently confirmed that the chocolate addition was indeed a winner. And while Sherrod laughed, he went ahead and put some on the rest of his own orange cranberry chicken club. Sherrod watched him lick chocolate sauce from the dripping sandwich, his eyes still, while he shook more images from his head.

“You’re a spark, Holden Wilson,” Sherrod softly said. “I mean, I don’t actually know you, you could be Dracula for all I know, but you’re a spark. And a very beautiful one at that.”

He actually blushed with pleasure. “Thank you.”

Smiling, nodding at his date, he felt wonderful, freed, knowing he’d at least found a solid half of his solution.

*

At the table with Sean, he paused speaking.

Around them, the clinking of cutlery on dinner plates seemed dampened.

Their server appeared, silently cleared plates, refilled water glasses, disappeared.

Across the table from him, Sean had turned his head and was looking across the light-littered LA basin toward the San Fernando Valley.

Sean wasn’t from LA. In the last few weeks he’d thought about that a lot. Even having been living there since he’d started playing for the Chargers, Sean had only been in town for seven years. Now he watched Sean looking across the views into the Valley and he wondered whether Sean was now thinking the same things he was. That this was a city in which memories stayed forever.

With names and places straight from his own mouth, would this city ever again be just their private place of magic?

He tried to stop thinking based on fear. Followed Sean’s gaze out across the Valley. But after half a second he was back staring at Sean. His heart hurting so much that had he not experienced the last three years, he would never have believed that something so physical could result from something purely mental.

Last night he’d called Craig, tried to wring from him whether Sean was acting or saying anything weird. Wanting to attend house parties without him, for instance. Craig of course was useless in circumstances that called for a human touch, for delicacy, only telling him, and he could feel the frowning condescension over the connection, _Like what, Holden? Nothing’s happened yet._

But after tonight, something _would <_ happen. Which was why he wished Sean would at least look at him.

But Sean still wasn’t.

“Go on, Holden.”

He didn’t. Not yet. Sean wasn’t looking at him, and he wouldn’t until Sean did.

Tonight they were alone. Just the two of them having dinner. Downstairs was a function, but on arriving he’d told Sean he was starving and didn’t like the menu being offered. Upstairs, fine dining was available. Both excuses were true, but he’d additionally lacked the stomach to enter another hall containing upset men he’d once dated. Especially because Herc and Lachlan had felt it necessary to attend, both being just as likely as Neil, Scott and Freddy to cause damage.

Conscious too, perhaps, that tonight would be particularly tough to hear, Sean had put up no resistance.

They’d been given a corner table on the restaurant’s hillside garden patio. On this lovely, fragrant night.

But now Sean was insistently looking away. Anywhere but at him.

Because tonight was the bitter center of it.

Tonight he was supposed to tell Sean what exactly he had done. Which was that he had taken everything that was special about them—everything secret and charmed, wholesome and fresh, hoodoo’d and delightful, all the things too sweet for words, all of their magic, and purposely, intentionally and callously spent on other men. All the things that made him laugh in private because Sean was so crazy, he found the surrogates to take it out of him. All he things he _didn’t_ let Sean whisper in his ear, he encouraged other men to say.

And after he was done telling all this, was he supposed to hope that Sean would just forget it all? No matter what Sean thought, there _were_ things that couldn’t be unheard. How were they supposed to come back to each other after he was done?

This was the thing that ate most at Sean. He knew it. This their second year. And now he was supposed to confirm it all?

At KV’s party, he’d been so worried about the limits of Sean’s love for him. But what should have worried him were its depths. They felt so profoundly for each other that even the pain which had driven Sean to Johnston, Sean had found a way to cope with it. Sean always had. So he knew what would happen when he was through here. Sean would also have to find a way to move them both on from here. And Sean would. But it would come at a price.

That price was what he didn’t know. But it was something he understood very well. Even if Sean somehow found a way to forgive him for the things he would hear, Sean would have done so by pushing it all down as far as he could. And there it would remain, slowly poisoning their love. It had already happened once when Sean had had nothing on which to base his anger but ghosts with no names. Now he was filling in Elliot’s _gaps_ in high definition?

No.

His stomach had been lead all day contemplating how to minimize this part. Had he known how to lie, even to tell those white ones that supposedly made bitter things go down easier, tonight he would have done so and done it hard.

But he couldn’t even breathe looking at him.

Sean stopped looking out toward the Valley and now looked directly at him. Sean was flushed brightly, all the way down his neck and into his open shirt collar. “I’m listening,” Sean said.

He didn’t answer.

“Go on, Holden.”

But his heart only squeezed tighter. When was the last time Sean had called him sweetheart. KV’s party? The morning after, maybe a week ago? No, he was being paranoid. But he couldn’t remember.

Maybe, he thought, staring at him, there was a way around this. Not by lying, but by not telling absolutely everything. No details.

As if reading his mind, or perhaps by this point Sean could just look at him and tell, Sean raised his eyes and cut him a look. “I don’t want anything between us, Holden. We’re only doing this once, so you’d better get it all out.”

He stared at the table’s cherry wood grain, then looked up at him again, and nodded.

Lowering his eyes to his stilled hands holding his cutlery, he said, “The idea of dating to— _deal_ with what I was feeling wasn’t because I didn’t want to be with you. It was just so I wouldn’t be thinking about you all the time. Just so it wouldn’t hurt so much staying away from you.” He paused. “It made sense at the time.”

Sean was back to not looking at him. His food was barely touched, his fork laid on his plate. “I guess,” Sean said. Then after a brief quiet, “But that wasn’t all of it, was it?”

“I was a different person, Sean,” he pleaded. “And I was attracted to you in a way that was . . . _different._ ”

“Which is why you decided to do something about it,” Sean said, pragmatically.

He watched the corner of Sean's mouth pull, a motion to mask the pain that shot across his face. And Sean said nothing more, leaving him to find the simple decency to say what he had done.

*

What he did was create cut-outs of Sean—craved out from his dates the things he loved most about him and used them as stand-ins.

He was going to have them sit across the table and be Sean when he couldn’t tolerate Sean across the table. In his bed for the same reason. In his living room, on the phone, anywhere he wanted. As importantly, he was going to be _Sean’s_ Holden with them; open, engaged, reachable.

Easy, neat, and as it turned out, extremely effective.

Grabbing lunch with Sherrod one workday, he took his strategy out for a spin. Starting with something easy: dessert. Out of listlessness, he hadn’t had eaten any in a while and so ordered some. Braced for Sherrod to make some kind of remark, instead he glanced up in delight when Sherrod said, “That’s exactly what I knew you’d order.”

During their dating the year before, Sean had explained to him that it made sense that he had a sweet tooth. “Why?” he’d asked, warily, and Sean had silently raised both eyebrows, looking deep into his eyes. It had unexpectedly drawn a hot laugh from him, that completely embarrassing kind that made it seem as if you were tilting your head and mouthing _Fuck me already._ But he had simply been so charmed. Almost believing he _was_ made of sweet things.

Now Sherrod was giving him echoes of that.

“How?” he asked him now, tempting the universe. “How could you have known?”

“That you’d order hot milk cake? Please.” Leaning forward over the small cafe table, Sherrod lowered his voice at him. “They could have replaced that item on the menu with your picture and people would be like, oh yeah, Holden Wilson. That must be hot milk cake. I’ll have that. And one to go please.”

He laughed. Not because it felt anything near like being with Sean, but because it _was_ nice. And comfortable. And were he with Sean, he would have insisted it was magic. But it wasn’t magic, wasn’t unique. It was just . . . great decision making.

—

Having regrouped, however, he soon became aware of a serious problem regarding his plan. It happened at dinner with Sherrod, toward the end of March. Rattled by echoes of the night of Sean’s return, he realized he really had only half a solution.

During dinner, Sherrod got a work related call about a possible breach into their systems and had to step outside to take the call. While waiting, he checked his messages. And on a whim and despite still being blocked, he took a chance and texted Sean.

_Thinking about you._

A reply came in: _Why? Am I dead or injured?_

His heart slammed hard.

He blinked at his phone. He’d been unblocked.

Breathlessly, he stared at the message, struggling to caution himself. Telling himself to take it easy, to not jump to replying at once. To take his time and think.

And so he gained lucidity about his strategy, that though he had regained control over himself, it meant nothing if he couldn’t also have some control over Sean. Sean’s needs were wildcards that would continually trip him up, clearly, because he could barely catch his breath just seeing the text. So what did it matter if he could handle himself the presence of other men but still not with Sean? He wasn’t even _in_ his presence and he felt like he was being turned inside out.

But he would get it right. The first step being to put away his phone, which he did. Did, and simply placed his hands on the table, watching his fingers drumming for some focus. Sean blocking him had given him time to remember a few more things, including than thinking deeply about handling men was like having deep thoughts about water. It was just what it was, all properties evident to the naked eye. So no problem. If he took his time, he would figure him out, and bring Sean Jackson, just like any other guy, to exactly where he wanted him.

—

On a business trip to Chicago the following week, it came to him.

The Drake Hotel’s management had been sweating a small financial matter they hadn’t wanted their board to sniff, so the CEO had called his mother asking on a personal level that his family take a look at it. Later that same evening, he’d been breathing Chicago’s energizing spring air. For a city capable of becoming so evilly cold, it certainly had springtime weather that made up for it.

Weather that also excited adventure seeking.

Finished after forty-eight hours of meetings, he’d found himself in the legendary city for the weekend with no place to go but out. He’d called his friends.

Craig and Elliot had made it up, and the three of them had rediscovered a place he and Elliot had once touched down in during Standford years. A place whose owners had newly refurbished, doubling down on upscaling, but somehow thinking it prudent to reopen under the rather unsubtle name of Temptation.

Temptation featured gorgeous dancers and escorts, and their VIP section quickly filled up. He smiled, goofily he could feel, as they all squeezed in tighter as more men showed up. Word had gotten fast around the club. Jostling that made Elliot's jaw tighten and his nostrils flare, and made him smile even more because Elliot never got what a man magnet his hard-to-get attitude was. 

Sometimes he’d tease Elliot that he knew his actual fear to be that he’d ultimately fall in love with an airhead, and spend the rest of his days making googly eyes at his cute dumbass while his friends laughed themselves to tears. Leaving all those guys who’d professed doctoral level dissertations trying to win his love eternally confused. Elliot had coolly reassured him that he’d set his screening process on autopilot since grad school and that he needn’t worry. 

It had always seemed to him that where men were concerned, Elliot gave himself unnecessary work.

The men of Temptation meanwhile were funny, sexy, smart, made to reel men like him in. “You’re so sweet,” he heard, up close, in whispers. “So adorable. I think I'm in love.” “Marry me,” others said laughingly.

In any other year, he would have simply enjoyed himself. That year, he found himself— _thinking._ Comparing.

Well, of course there was no pressure sitting back in a club with these men no matter how attractive. Still, he touched them and felt just enough pleasure for a nice night out. And they reciprocated. And everyone had fun. Both sides contended. It didn’t matter what they whispered to each other, most guys understood how real life worked. So why did Sean always want more? Why wasn’t Sean able to accept what he had to give?

Why had Sean unblocked him?

It was literarily while smiling at the dancer who’d come to occupy his lap, whispering in his ear while slowly fishing twenty dollar bills from his shirt pocket, that it occurred to him what he was doing wrong, and exactly how he was going to manage Sean Jackson.

It was so simple. All along he’d been behaving like Elliot, putting in too much effort into thinking about water. Sean was the newbie here, not him. Sean who wasn’t even out of the closet. Whether Sean had relationships inside the NFL or not, in LA or not, Sean wasn’t playing in the same league as him. In this space, he was the pro, used to all of this. Used to men confessing all sorts of things to him. Used to managing occasionally volatile emotions when expectations didn’t match reality. Used to putting out fires well before they got started. And doing it all without raising his temperature. Yet here he was, letting Sean set the tone and pace of their relationship. Why, when with such limited experience, Sean knew next to nothing about being in this space. Why was he so panicked when end to end, he had the upper hand? Of course he could bring Sean Jackson under control. He wouldn’t even break a sweat.

It was as if the heavens had opened and showered him with answers. And his astounded look must have reflected on his face because the one on his lap stood up and crooked a finger at him.

—

Back in a LA that Monday night, he texted Sean.

_If you’re injured I’d like to come take care of you. Kiss your pain better._

In bed, Sherrod next to him, he waited for the delivery checkmarks to appear. Listening to the deep steady beating of his heart. Ashamed because he’d never done anything like this before, texting an ex while in bed with a guy. But fascinated despite that, at the newness of it, at how devastatingly arousing it was. If last year’s breakup texting had been a category 1, this was a category 3 hurricane. Although in the midst of it he would have labeled it as hot as it got, that had been two years ago and he had since experienced core meltdown. So midrange, it had been at the time.

It had been wild. But Sean wasn’t just an ex though, was he, he’d thought that night. Sean was also a friend. Someone he cared very much about. It didn’t matter that he was still attracted to him, the fact was that they weren’t together. One at a time _was_ still one at a time and in Chicago he hadn’t taken anyone back to his suite for that simple reason. He was with Sherrod, so no play there. He was keeping to his rules.

That, and many other absurd things, was what he told himself that night and all the nights throughout that year.

Staring at the grey rectangle containing his text, he added, _There’s no reason we’re apart. Don’t keep me away._

Replacing the phone on the nightstand, he laid back down with a deep sigh. Sherrod stirred, wrapping an arm around him and pulling him close. Echoes of someone else. He turned to him and kissed his neck, down his shoulder, down his arm, and eyes closed, made love to Sean.

―

He had received a reply.

_If you can’t give me what I want then why are you bugging me??_

Inside their head of media’s office after a weekly senior staff meeting, he sat on one end of the sofa staring at his phone while everyone, except Tani whose office it was, filed out. Soon he had silence. He analyzed the development.

Rather than answering his lighthearted text from a few nights back, Sean had chosen to respond to his email from before his dinner with Alastair.

Okay, so nothing but real issues were going to get a response from Sean. Not only was Sean giving into his anger, Sean was going to use it to get answers. So he answered him.

_Because I can give you all of me, when you have me._

It was a line he had practically patented, and had never seen it fail on a guy.

Sean never replied to it.

But that afternoon he returned to his office knowing that, delayed replies or no, Sean was reading his messages.

Sherrod, meanwhile, had more or less dumped him. Not in a bad or dramatic way, and actually had been kind of funny. 

To keep his clients current on the latest security tech, Arthur Railings regularly sent along invitations for personal security conferences—private demos and the like—where former US and international intelligence community people, now in the private sector, showcased their skills for hire. He used to manage attendance annually but hadn’t in a while. That year he had Rachel RSVP him and a guest and took Sherrod.

After just a couple of pitch rooms, Sherrod, who’d gone from CalTech straight into the banking industry, so Wall Street basically, and had never worked in the fast-paced and apparently exciting world of personal security, was sporting a zapped look. He knew this look. Sherrod was falling in love with everything at the conference and he was rapidly being left behind. Once the rather buff security tech guy started talking secret materials used for making noncommercial chip types and restricted coding languages, he watched Sherrod’s breath softly escape him . . . like he’d actually seen happen in bed. Then the two of them started talking up a storm of jargon, until when Sherrod suddenly remembered his existence and turned a guilty, sheepish grin at him, he’d just smiled and raised a hand, saying he had to make a call anyway.

Geeks, he’d thought as he left the room. Why did he even bother. There in the hallway had been among the many times he’d checked to see if Sean had replied to anything he’d sent.

Since then, Sherrod, who’d felt bad at having gotten swept up by his new interest, their lunches thinning out—to which he’d told him no problem, he knew better than to compete with true love—had pretty much wandered off. Probably with the guy from the pitch room. Then several days past, Sherrod had called to let him know that he’d been scooped up offer by the very security firm with a dream offer and that he was leaving the bank. He’d told him congratulations, hoped he and the guy had lots of babies and a great 401k, to which Sherrod had laughed and assured him it was nothing like that.

He did actually know what it was, since they’d been broken up for over a week and he’d been informed of the bank’s offer by Arthur Railings. He’d wished him best of luck and Sherrod had thanked him for all the great dessert moments.

And now Sean had finally replied him. Putting him back in the driver’s seat. And officially reopening his path back to Malibu.

*


	4. Breaking You

So, on realizing that despite having the upper hand, someone else has control over your feelings, what did you do? Why, you set about breaking them, of course. You didn’t even have to be a bad person to do it. Just desperate enough.

Just fortunate enough to know them so well. At that point, maybe better than they knew themselves.

But first there’s groundwork to be tended to. First, because you know he’s angry, you want to get him out of that state. You tell him you’re sorry, acknowledge that you’re the problem. But that it doesn’t have to be this way. Tell him you can take care of all his needs, if he’ll just let you. You tell him you’ve never wanted to hurt him and that it hurts to know he’s going through this. You say it because it’s true, and because truth is the sexiest thing between you. It always has been. The truth of the way you put your hands on each other, when you grip until you make each other cry out. In that, there’s no artifice, nowhere to hide, so that when you tell him what’s true in you, he recognizes it. Easily, even if he’s blocked by his own insecurities, and of course by your own efforts, from seeing the entire picture. Make him feel you’re in it together.

Massage until he’s warm, pliant, subdued.

Groundwork laid, the plan is to get back in his good graces, at least enough for him to listen. So that you can get back in his physical space, even if for just one night. Close, closer than he’s had it in months, where he can be reminded of what he’s missing—what he’s been denying himself. Where you can see what he’s repressing in his eyes, in his body. And you’ll know you’re getting it right.

Now, a most important part is how you use your own pressure release valve. When on your side of town, how to apply the men you’re dating to the cause of retaining self-control. This part you have to nail. Otherwise you look into his eyes and turn into a bowl of fluffy marshmallow and there go your brain and all your schemes. Imagine waking up the next morning and once more believing you’re the hero in your own romance novel. Um, no.

Take dating with a purpose seriously, therefore. Dating for the single purpose of gauging how you feel when they say or do something he would. With him you stop it, with them you allow it. You even engage them in your roleplay. Were you right and was he wrong? Of course you were, of course he was.

And always, you text him. Wind him up, stroke him down. You’re waiting for just one thing—for when he begs you back. He absolutely will.

It works. Of course it works. You want each other so badly you’ve convinced yourselves the sky is an ocean of warm water, and the ground beneath your feet a carpet of clouds. _You_ started this chase and you’ve already done one lap—you’ve seen the placements of the steeples and hurdles, including the ones of his personality that constantly had you stumbling in uncertainty and confusion. But now, you’re no longer off guard.

And when, at last, he does call you back, whatever the circumstances of your exit, it’ll be on your terms. So that, for instance, when leaving, you’ll be able to say something like, _This was nice. We should do it again._ And he’ll see that between the two of you, you’re the one in control.

Rinse and repeat, if necessary. Until you get your desired results.

And because this was the year your feelings for each other gelled and you were meant to forge the next stage in your relationship, this mutated version you’ve created is doing just that. Molding you together in an ownership dynamic you don’t understand but think you do. And things only getting worse: you _have_ forged bonding and commitment, only in a messed up way. But you’ve done it, so your love is now more intense, your lovemaking more so. Your time together more precious, your feelings for each other magnified to the point where everything else, inside you, outside you, only exists in its horizon-wide field of distortion.

That’s the catch. You break them by breaking yourself.

—

For most of the men he dated, the most exciting prospect was the anticipation of enjoying _the lifestyle._ Being the way they assumed he lived. That he flew only private jets, ate gourmet for breakfast, lunch and dinner, enjoyed fly-in evenings to Hawaii and Macau on a whim, spent Easters horse riding in equestrian estates in England, skied with royalty at Christmas, spent Thanksgivings with David Geffen and Oprah on super-yachts, New Years in orgies at Versailles, weekends at exclusive island resorts, and at the snap of a finger had concierge services get him anything, anytime, anywhere in the world.

There was no fantasy he hadn’t heard.

Most of it was true, in that those were all services and experiences available. But he was just one person and there were only twenty-four hours in a day. All his close friends lived in LA, and they all loved the town. So by and large he just worked, traveled mostly for business and hung out locally with his friends enjoying life in town.

But he wasn’t oblivious to perception, nor to the very real way it could get him what he wanted. And when he decided to free himself of his feelings for Sean Jackson, he was only too aware of the easiest way to make men fall in love. Or at least think they had.

Fresh off his epiphanies with Sherrod and the men of Temptation, and Sean opening up a line of dialogue via text, he was ready to rebound. Sit Sean Jackson across the table, by surrogates, and school him on adult relationships, one guy at a time.

Under this moronic scheme he dated Freddy, Herc, Aaron, Alonso, and a few more that spring and summer, until he was faced with the strange dose of hyper-reality that was Amir.

If they were funny, he asked for a date. Sweet, same. Could cook, get on board. Had _that_ body? Yup. Radiated a familiar, quiet contentment, he was spending time with them. Ping, ping, on his radar, he made time.

And while doing all that, he fashioned the most special leash in the world for the one he loved.

—

Freddy came first. Freddy who liked threesomes like most people liked eating out. He hadn’t known beforehand, of course. He’d only liked Freddy’s sex appeal, which in spite of Freddy’s Petey-like ease and type of energy, was ferocious. No soft eyes like Sean, no soft smile. But Freddy had a lanky frame made of steel around which it was impossible to think of anything but sex.

One evening at a cocktail fundraiser, just days after Sean had replied asking why, if they couldn’t be together, he was texting bugging him, Freddy had been in his circle of guests talking about philanthropic work he was doing with teenagers through Tim and Yellen’s involvement at Covent House. For some reason, it reminded him of how he and Sean had met, and when he glanced sideways, almost expecting to see Sean standing there, Freddy caught his look, and without missing a beat, returned it in spades.

They spent the night together that Friday, and in the morning had laughed easily, and Freddy was gentle mannered and fun. Because of that, when they talked after, he let himself open up a little, warmed to the idea of falling deeply sexually.

“So what are you into?” he asked Freddy.

Big mistake.

For the next two weeks, the number he used for dating was slammed with acceptances for threesomes, foursomes and orgies he’d never asked for in the first place. Like a jungle cat unleashed, Freddy continually seemed to be . . . ferociously mounting him, straddled and staring firery eyed down at him, suggesting that they traipse to Hong Kong or Bangkok or Barcelona or wherever for an even more memorable experience.

“We could— I mean, we could just do that on a weekend, right? _You_ could get us there. Like, after dinner at the Colosseum, in Rome? I hear they have concerts there. So . . .” here a causal shrug, “we could just do that. And . . . I mean, God, those deadly hot Italian men. I’d— I’d literally just make a google account and start dropping pins. Talk to me, sexy.” Without the courage to tell Freddy that even a threesome right there in his apartment in Westwood would have been memorable enough, he’d somehow stammered away from the topic.

He had eventually flown them to Rome for a stay at the Residenza Napoleone, where Freddy had been beside himself over the hotel’s historic status and attending an opera and some renowned chef’s restaurant opening. Still, Freddy had very clearly been disappointed that they next hadn’t loaded up on dripping hot Dolce & Gabbana underwear models—and maybe Italian soccer stars, though that part of the conversation might still be a little murky and impenetrable to him—to host a suite party blowout for the ages.

Anyway, he’d actually had to end it when, on returning to LA, front desk had called up one evening to let him know that a “Jonas from Lotus” was calling to know whether he should start coming over. Lotus being an escort service, he’d quickly nipped that escapade in the bud and wound it down with Freddy.

So yeah. Not a great start.

Sometime between Rome and Jonas from Lotus, having realized that his and Freddy’s ideas of sexual connection were quite mismatched, he’d sent Sean a follow-up message.

_Hope you got my previous text. I meant every word._

His previous text had been that he could give him all of him, when they were together. 

Days later, enjoying a delicious Mediterranean salad rooftop with a friend at a new Century City eatery, he received Sean’s reply.

Having suspected that Sean’s prior replies had been knee-jerk, that Sean hadn’t yet processed his shock enough for things to get real, he wasn’t at all surprised to see that things had gotten real. Sean was, at last, angry.

_Am I supposed to be impressed by you?_ Sean’s text read. _Are you fucking kidding me?? Am I supposed to be dealing with YOUR decision to walk out AND how I feel about it? Don’t fucking text me looking for ways to feel good about yourself, Holden! Or flog the bullshit you sell yourself. I'll block you!_

He read the text a couple times. Then, locking the screen, he put down the phone, picked up his fork and resumed eating. “All good?” Mateo asked, and he nodded. “How’s dating life? You still seeing Jake? Is that him? Is that why you have that spaced look?”

“I have a spaced look?”

Mateo snorted, smirking. “Yeah, the one you get when you’re trying to figure out what next to do about a guy.”

“What, like a tell? I don’t have a tell.”

“This is true. You are in fact the master of misdirection. However, you do get a look.”

“No, _you_ get a look.”

Mateo momentarily squeezed his eyes shut, grimacing. “I don’t get a look, I get a hangover.”

He’d laughed. Not knowing that someday soon, that joke too would be on him.

Still, regarding Sean, he’d realized he needed to tread carefully. There’d be no bringing Sean off his anger if he got himself continually blocked. So no more patented replies. And no more emails either, since he didn’t want to give Sean any ideas in that direct.

And so that night, enjoying the peacefulness of a bedroom not under the threat of being turned into a brothel, he sent an apology. 

_You’re right. I'm sorry my text read that way. That wasn’t my intention._

_How could you, Holden?_ came the immediate reply. _What the fuck are you doing? How do you walk away when we haven’t even have an argument? How can you do this? Why do you just wake up and LEAVE me? I didn’t ASK you for marriage, I didn’t ASK you for anything, so why do you keep doing this? Am I missing something? What’s over there that I can’t give you??_

Not knowing what Sean meant by that last sentence, what Sean had seen the year before, and assuming Sean just meant the basic act of staying away, he’d responded, _I didn’t leave you, Sean. You asked me to go._

Tapping send, on his back in bed, he stared at the text for a long time. Then he composed another.

_Nothing’s happened between us. Nothing’s gone wrong. I just needed to be away for a while. Of course I'll be back. You know I will._ He paused, thought some more, and added, _We’re so good together. Don’t make this a problem._

And sent that took.

Sean didn’t reply. But the checkmarks showed delivery.

—

A couple of nights later, he was standing on the balcony of a Benedict Canyon estate home, attending a dinner party for a truly horrible media mogul. He’d frankly come to overhear anything he could later dish to his dad, and also because one of the mogul’s sons was gay and apparently believed it automatically bestowed on his father a soul. Better anyway that he and the son, and anyone else who could, be on the frontline and take any flack people like his father could detonate before it hit those behind him. At least the son’s “mixologist” bartender boyfriend’s nonalcoholic cocktails were known to be legendary.

Leaned on the balcony’s rather epic stone railing—at either ends Elliot had once told him there were busts of Roman emperors, though he’d never had any interest in finding out—he’d been enjoying the canyon’s night breezes and atmospherically listening to acquaintances arguing over national politics. But also to a guy near them talking about cooking. Descriptions of cooking on very early weekend mornings, preferring to memorize recipes and cook from taste and sensory reaction, especially if there was someone else there to do the latter, all sounding so idyllic and improbably magical and generating feelings that reminded him so much of someone else, that he turned and looked right at the speaker.

“Hi,” the guy said to him a little later, having left his group to come talk to him. “Holden Wilson, right?”

Which was how he got to dating Herc.

Herc at the time was an associate segment producer at ABC News. Weekends were in fact when Herc was most free, so besides catching dinners, they spent weekends at his house in the Hollywood Hills. A flowered rear patio overlooking the city, a great view of the Hollywood sign.

Cool morning spent sitting on a wrought iron chair in his flannel pajama bottoms, legs stretched and ankles crossed, watching the blue haze clear over the city. Then listening to Herc cook and talk—he wouldn’t have minded getting to talk a little more, but it wasn’t a big deal—while admiring the view. The one inside the kitchen, that was. Herc was half-Japanese and black Irish, tall and raven-haired and as pale-skinned as him, so that “exotic” didn’t do him justice. And cooked barefoot. And had polished granite floors. Not black, but close enough, and really did have a natural, sexy relationship with food preparation. Watching him generated absolutely all the right feelings, the ones that needed to be expended, while applying a little imagination did the rest to transport him to hazy Malibu mornings and to the realms of another sexy, barefoot cook. With zero pressure, it had been even more empowering than sexing it up over desserts with Sherrod.

One Sunday afternoon, post mining lots of information from him about Cecelia and Alastair’s personal interests—because so many guys seemed confident that accessing his parents was the key to winning permanency in his life—Herc asked whether Alastair did in fact own a particular exclusive Sonoma vineyard. 

When he said no, Herc feigned mild confusion and restrained curiosity and asked whether, nevertheless, it was true that the label could only be accessed for delivery via certain exclusive concierge services. He had no idea, which was what he’d told Herc, but seeing that Herc had repeated the word _exclusive_ enough times to ring a cathedral bell, he’d added that they could certainly find out.

It turned out that the label was available on his card, and in a couple of hours a young delivery guy, who reminded him a lot of Alvarez’s excitable cousin Mikey, had shown up with a boxed pair of bottles in a pretty wooden crate. Herc had been speechless, charmed to heaven and back.

So now on the balcony, where he’d been instructed to sit, he now waited to be served a glass of the wine and some complementary finger foods. Waiting while Herc traveled the kitchen calling out what he could expect in a minute, he was on his phone to Sean.

Because Herc’s happiness had made him feel good about himself.

_Hope you’re having a great Sunday._

Then, practically chilled to the bone with wanting to fuck him, he added, _Missing you._

Herc appeared, balancing their food and half-filled glasses of the precious wine on a clear plastic tray. Setting up the balcony table just as Sean replied. His phone gave a long hard buzz and Herc looked at it.

“You gotta get that?”

“Yeah,” he replied, picking it up and moving into a shaded alcove of purple hibiscus and looking at the screen.

_Oh, you wanna play games. Well here’s something you can work with. I know you’ve fallen in love with me even if you won’t accept it. I'm not an idiot. But Holden I never asked you to say the words back to me. You’re the one choosing to repress your feelings for me and I don’t know why. It hurts so much that you keep denying what we feel for each other yet you don’t hesitate to put me in a corner over it. You’re causing me so much pain and I don’t know why. I just know I've done nothing to deserve it._

The text ended there, but a second one followed. _Stay the fuck away from my house. I don’t want you ANYWHERE over here._

So Sean was still angry.

But underneath it was something else. A deeper, smaller movement toward something else. Staring at the words as if at a painting that would soon revel its hidden brushstrokes, revealing its true subject, he saw the outlines of it, though he couldn’t nail it. But it was there. All he had to do to, eventually have him completely, was keep Sean painting.

But not today. Slipping his phone back into his pocket, he turned and watched Herc set a last piece of side plate then raise his hand, like an artist applying a finishing touch. Herc then looked up across the small patio at him with a big, very handsome smile.

“Oh my God,” Herc said, staring at him and radiating joy and astonishment. “Come _here._ Come taste the magic you’ve weaved on this totally random Sunday afternoon.” Laughing, Herc said, “Marry me, boyfriend.”

Smiling, he went over, sat down.

“Too soon?” Herc said, laughing at his non-reply.

“Way too soon,” he replied.

—

_I don’t mean to cause you pain._

Leaned against the glass wall behind their receptionist area, he stared out at the bright morning cityscape, thinking over the rest of what he’d texted Sean. _You know how much I care about you. How much I want to see you again. Hold you._

It was Monday morning after his weekend with Herc and he was a little surprised at how much his heart was hurting. Yet he was in better shape than just a month ago. So Sean would get there too. Face his own anger and accept that he had indeed walked away. And why. And then begin to accept that there was no negotiating this. Still it had been hard-going watching for the checkmarks, unaware he wasn’t breathing until he saw them. Receipt confirmed, he’d lowered his phone. Now he waited for his heart to stop tripping up his throat.

Sean did respond, but late that night, so it wasn’t until the next morning, about eating breakfast, that he checked and saw the message.

_You’re sending me mixed signals, Holden. Do you even hear yourself? I don’t get this. I don’t get why we’re not together. If we both want this, why aren’t you here?_

_Do you want me to come?_

Forkful of eggs suspended, he stood at his kitchen counter staring at the screen, almost believing Sean was suddenly where he wanted him to be. But of course not. 

He finished breakfast, went upstairs to shower and still nothing from Sean.

It wouldn’t happen overnight.

He was in his study preparing his brief to leave for work when Sean’s reply came. Sitting on the desk’s edge, he read it.

_I don’t understand what’s happening._

And he breathed, satisfied.

Here were those hidden brushstrokes, beginning to show the real subject matter. Sean’s pain was morphing into confusion. And confusion he could work with. Confusion had room for movement and wanted to listen. Wanted explanations. Would even take alternatives. 

Yes, Sean’s texts were hard to read for the raw, throbbing ache pulsing from screen. But no one said it would be easy. After a moment, he responded.

_I keep telling you there’s nothing to understand. Just take a step back and ask yourself whether things should automatically mean what you think._

_How could they not?_

He took his time with an answer. _There are no rulebooks in relationships. It’s only about what we feel. And what we feel is amazing. Don’t throw things at it just because._

_What things, Holden? Wanting to be together? Wanting to grow what we have into something more meaningful and fulfilling? Are those the things you think are so bad?_

_You have so much more to give, Sean, much more than all this. Don’t damage us because of . . ._ something you saw in a movie. But, fingers pressed to his temple, he didn’t text that. Instead he wrote _. . . social expectations._

_Sean, I want to be with you so much,_ he quickly wrote before a reply could come, though he sensed he wouldn’t be getting any more today after that answer. _It’s been three months. Daily I wake wondering what we’re achieving in fighting each other._

He thought for another moment, then added, _This doesn’t have to be all or nothing._

For half an hour he waited, but Sean was done for now. Putting his phone away, he picked up his brief and left the study.

—

At the office, a little over a month after having started a relationship with Herc, he wound that down too.

Herc was not only surprised but affronted. Two years later, long after having been handed a producer position at ABC News following their breakup, he really shouldn’t have been surprised that Herc had affected _baffled amusement_ in Sean’s face at Blake’s. While the attitude had been entirely put on, because really, was Herc sustaining hurt two years on, the display had nonetheless had probably been the nicest way Herc could convey what he’d really wanted to say.

“You know,” Herc did say that morning over the phone, which was how he had broken up with him. “I’d _heard_ you do this and I didn’t believe it. I’d always assumed there was a problem with the other guy and not you. Because you seem so sweet, you know? I assumed you’d just never met the right guy who could touch your heart, but also fit into your lifestyle. But clearly I was wrong. Because Holden, I _was_ that guy. I know I was. I saw the way you’d look at me when you didn’t know I could see. I can objectively say that there was _nothing_ wrong with us. So why the hell are we breaking up?”

Caught off guard by Herc’s intense sentiments, he stared at his laptop screen and couldn’t say anything.

Herc sighed, small, hard. “You’re gonna run out of room one day, Holden. And it’s someone like me you’ll be trying to get.”

Well, that much was incorrect.

Pulled back to reality by the unwarranted arrogance, he listened while Herc ranted a little longer, carefully choosing his words, before blessing him with explicit forgiveness and quietly ending the call. Likely there’d be a couple follow up texts before Herc ran out of steam. But that was fine. Although to him, the indignation some guys displayed would always seem forced, seeing as they all dated the same way. Faked, used and loved each other evenly. All justifiable, apparently, until it happened to you.

In his mind at the time, even Sean seemed to be doing a version of it.

—

After breaking up with Herc, a small emotional surprise awaited him later that evening, when Craig invited him to grab a quick dinner after work.

Looking particularly sexy and enigmatic in a clingy onyx T-shirt and off-white trousers, Craig watched him squeeze in across the small table, which he bumped but was able to steady, at a busy Le Petit Four.

He sat back, pursed his lips and blew out a soft breath. And accepting the server’s recommendation for a drink to pep and refresh after a long work day, he was soon sipping an ice cold ginger-lime-cayenne something that was actually doing what was promised, while Craig sipped a second pear vodka.

Craig had been out of work for a couple of days on some mysterious personal time and looked quite well. 

Whereas he’d had an inexplicably long and mentally difficult day and felt run over.

Craig skimmed a look over him. “Hey, Chief.”

He nodded, glancing around the restaurant. “Wow. Busy tonight.”

“Yeah. Glad I got here first, otherwise I’m sure you’d have given out our table already and we’d be standing on the sidewalk sipping these drinks.”

He brought his gaze back to Craig. “We still might.” And eyeing him, he said queryingly, “You look queerly good. You sure you won’t take another couple of days?”

Craig smiled enigmatically. “Two were enough.”

Fingering the menu, he held off picking it up for the moment. “So where’d you go?”

Craig laughed a little. But said nothing.

“Chicago?” he ventured. “What was that one’s name? The one who swore he had family in LA when you kissed him goodbye. I guess you didn’t need to send a ticket.”

Craig was smiling widely, saved from answering by their server dropping by to ask if they needed help with the menu. Barely having an appetite, he nonetheless joined Craig in ordering some food between them. Without being able to put his finger on it, he’d felt emotionally drained all day and it certainly wasn’t over Herc. He could have gone straight home and crawled into bed.

“How’s it going with the producer from ABC?”

“That’s over.”

“I noticed you’ve been doing more of the relationship thing lately. Any particular reason?”

He shrugged. “Just feeling like it.”

Craig tipped him a smile. “Feeling like what? Late night cuddles and early morning back rubs?”

He locked gazes with Craig. “Are those the kinds of things that happen in relationships?”

“You tell me.”

Lowering his eyes to his place setting, he took a moment to answer. Then he looked up across the busy restaurant, and after a long moment said, “It’s a lot weirder than that.”

And so the small surprise popped itself open—he’d actually underestimated the impact of Sean’s pain on him. Of course he didn’t want Sean going through anything like this and Herc amplifying it in his ear had pushed it to the fore. His heart felt bruised, his body physically exhausted from the effort he hadn’t realized he’d been exerting all day to keep Sean’s aches at bay.

He glanced at Craig looking fresh and glowy, and realized that Craig was right. He needed a fucking cuddle.

—

Not that Sean exactly cuddled. Hardly ever got into bed, or anywhere else, to hold him in the way he understood a cuddle. What Sean had was a dense body mass and a gift for being able to lie completely still and quiet. So that bearing his weight kept him still as well, and deeply warmed, like being melded with heated, heavy iron.

He didn’t want that. He wasn’t supposed to be dating to knee-cap his efforts. The need for comfort would be in passing anyway, so the issue would soon be moot. He didn’t even know why he was thinking so much about it. 

Still, feeling run over after Herc’s accusations, he first considered leaving off dating altogether for the rest of the summer. Until Sean was back in San Diego. Since he’d sorted his feelings, maybe that was enough. Maybe he could cut down on a social life and focus exclusively on handling Sean.

But on getting home that night after his dinner with Craig, he could have gone crazy. No, he didn’t really want a cuddle, but the need for comfort hadn’t quite passed yet. He called up Elliot, not willing to reference his malaise but hoping for an invitation to a sleepover. Elliot had an overnight guest. He tried Petey and got no pickup at all. He went to bed. But by morning he realized that unless he could distract himself, the vague nausea and dread were on their way back. He thought of Sean blatantly pushing for a commitment and the world darkened and swayed a little, as if he’d been hit by a passing bout of dizziness.

Someone someday, he mused, thinking back on that night, needed to invent an actual anti-lovesickness pill.

As fortune would have it, Petey returned his call by mid-afternoon, listening to him spout some depleted sentences before gracefully inviting him as his date to a Hollywood movie premiere that night. It sounded perfect.

So that evening, both tuxed up, he went as Petey’s . . . mostly ignored date . . . while Petey went off and hooked up with a movie star.

They were separated almost as soon as they arrived, since they obviously weren’t actually dating, and Petey had already squeezed and kissed him and that for Petey was full spectrum emotional support. Worse, he was left with KV and Muller, whose presence at the party had already assured him he wasn’t ready for any of it. A little more raucous than he’d come for, he’d had their car get him home from the party well before midnight.

On waking the following morning, alone in bed and staring at the ceiling, having left his phone in his study so he wouldn’t wake groping for it, he was tamping simmering emotions, and knew it was either he get back on the dating scene or fail keep his distance from Sean Jackson.

He needed an alteration in strategy.

—

He had a friend, Kieren, a tall, handsome Tom Cruise lookalike, if Tom Cruise were Korean. Kieren had been a year ahead of him and Elliot at USC and was genius-level intelligent. He was also pansexual _and_ with a high sex drive and so knew things around sexuality . . . not readily available in most bookstores, one might say. Where most people had genuine close friends of two or three, Kieren’s numbered by the bushel, relationships all well-tended to. Kieren worked in Century City with him, as a lawyer at a big, soulless law firm, and was maybe a little soulless himself. But in a harmless, self-involved way. So you could tell Kieren anything you wanted, any of your problems—as long as it didn’t involve criminal activity, for which, Kieren would tell you, he’d feel obligated to report you. Anything else and Kieren would snort quietly and toss his hair, which was so long it brushed his shirt collar, draw his brow and say, “Gimme twenty-four hours.”

Occasionally, he did have need for Kieren’s apparently vast problem solving skill sets, and once in a while they’d catch up over lunch.

Sean hadn’t communicated with him in over two weeks, since their exchange in his study. However it didn’t worry him too much because he knew Sean wasn’t ignoring him. Rather, Sean's silence was indication of a struggle, a product of his confusion. Their conversation had progressed to the core of the problem between them, even if they were attacking it peripherally. But he had offered to come back. Now, knowing the terms, it was up to Sean to decide whether that would happen.

If he handled things right, this was the space in which he would win. Which meant this was also where he needed to pay the most attention. So no more month-long, overly distracting relationships.

When he lunched with Kieren in the midst of Sean’s silence, he asked for the number of a friend who could be easy, fun distraction, explaining that while he didn’t want just overnight guests, he wasn’t right then in the market for anything serious.

“You know,” he said.

Kieren drew his brow, eyes sharpened underneath. “I see sadness.”

“I’m not sad.”

Kieren unsharpened his eyes, rolled out several numbers, but told him to call Aaron first.

—

Aaron was among the sweetest, most affectionate men he had ever met. A good listener with a talent for physical touch, and a dimpled smile so sweet and welcoming it was downright healing.

Evidently, Kieren had seen more in his eyes than he’d meant to show.

Much like Sean, Aaron was also a homebody, happy to spend evenings at home making hot teas and giving massages, easily going with whatever flow. In fact Aaron was so . . . compatible, he called Kieren after the first night wanting to know the truth. Was Aaron what he thought he was?

Kieren had made a _pssh_ sound and said, “Nope. He really is just a friend. Just a really low stress guy. I see a lot of you in him, actually. Actually, I don’t even mean that metaphorically. Isn’t it like staring in the mirror? Have fun and don’t call me again with your self-judgment.”

Besides being both a good listener, Aaron was also versed in the language and actions of relationships. All that support and thoughtfulness. It _was_ suspicious. But ultimately he trusted Kieren, and really, Aaron probably just seemed on point because of where he was with Sean.

And so when Aaron was over, they prepared simple meals together—the most either of them could manage—and had dinner together at his dining table, cozily talking. And sometimes they watched shows together. Still, when Aaron came over one evening with flowers, and of all things, home decor catalogs, his initial reaction had been to withhold all reaction. Only to have Aaron notice and laugh. 

“Oh, no, no, don’t be scared! I know you’re not into this. I’m just redoing my apartment and genuinely wanted your opinion.”

Later, on his living room floor surrounded by open catalogs, Aaron smiled at him. 

“I’m not here to convince you of anything, you know. You really can relax. I'm here to have a good time with you. So you’d better show me a good time, Holden Wilson.”

He’d smiled back, okay with that. They’d been seeing each other for almost two weeks and Aaron’s easy laughter and sweet smile were still so comforting. He’d asked him what he wanted.

“All of it,” Aaron said, laughing, leaned back against the couch from where he’d been holding up glossy catalog pages for him to yes or no. “No idea how long you’re gonna want me around, so honestly? Just do me. Do me right, do me hard, and . . . can I say it? Do me _lifestyle._

He looked at him. “You want that?”

“Of course.”

“Why haven’t you said anything?”

Aaron shrugged. “Who wants to seem obnoxious.”

He’d liked Aaron. Again, not that he’d appreciated the streak of irreverence Aaron would show two years down the road at Yamashiro the night Sean asked him to come clean. But while they’d been going out, he’d enjoyed every moment of their time together.

So he’d encouraged Aaron to send along some ideas for special dates, and soon Aaron was unabashedly calling him during work hours, “Hi, it’s Mrs. Wilson calling,” laughing warmly and happily. “Check your email, dearest.” And there would be a link for some exclusive event from some website that catered to the very rich. A yacht show in Monaco, dinner and a private fine art tour in Paris, an evening of sake tasting in Manhattan, and so on. It had been his pleasure to oblige.

Aaron had also been whom he’d been dating when he’d first developed . . . complications over Grey’s Anatomy.

Try as he might, he’d been unable to escape conflating Sean with the actor on the show who was Sean’s dead ringer. Aaron had been lying with him on the couch, giving funny, adorable commentary about the shenanigans, when, relaxed, thoughts far, he’d started getting dry mouthed watching the actor. Then, slowly, at a point, Aaron sat up, propped on one hand, staring down at his sweatpants, at what had forced him up, before raising his eyes to lock gazes with him.

“Which one, cutie pie?” Aaron asked.

With a neutral expression, he said, “Take your pick.”

Aaron gave him a big, dimpled smile, then lowering himself, began kissing down his body. He’d gripped Aaron’s hair and to this day didn’t know how he hadn’t whispered the name on his lips.

—

From the back seat of the limo, Aaron touched a finger to his chest, just like Sean would when commanding his undivided attention. “I am _very_ impressed with you, Holden Wilson.” 

“Over sake tasting reservations?”

Aaron smiled. “For showing a simple boy a good time. Kieren said not to expect any future calls from you, but I really hope we get to see each other again some day. Maybe for a Grey’s viewing.”

He’d kissed Aaron’s lips through the lowered window, kissing his healing smile, and stepped back as Aaron settled into the dimmed interior and told the driver they could go. Over the next couple of years whenever they saw each other, it was always in different circles, but Aaron would always have the same welcoming smile, giving him the sense of having a friend. Except, ironically, on the night he’d probably needed it the most.

Aaron, anyway, had been six weeks ago. Since then he’d excelled at his own rule and stuck to only dinner or event dating. And only from Kieren’s stash. Like that he dated Alonso, Sasha, Alex and Quinn. Amir didn’t happen until one month before Sean was to leave for San Diego. And Amir wasn’t from Kieren and was definitely unplanned.

Through them all, he texted Sean.

Through being with each one he found the distance and words he needed to speak to the only one that mattered, but whose power over him he feared so much.

And through them all, Sean maintained a deep silence.

Alonso was a law professor from Mexico, concluding a year’s sabbatical as a consultant at an international law firm in Century City. Alonso was full of great stories and had an ancestral uncle who’d been a “cowboy and a revolutionary” with Zapata and reminded him, maybe a little worryingly, of his dad’s chef, Alvarez. Just under six feet, with a thick body and thick arms and an iron torso, and brown-skinned like Petey, Alonso had jet black hair on his head and . . . everywhere else. And was a fantastic sartorialist.

Being the tail end of his sabbatical, therefore, and a couple days from saying goodbye, he took Alonso clothes shopping. As a way to convey his gratitude, but really, listening to and watching him interact with tailors was exciting enough to be pornographic.

Alonso had been floored. They’d spent an afternoon on Rodeo, him mostly seated in dressing rooms giving his opinion and getting an eyeful while Alonso dressed and undressed for the tailors and sales assistants. Halfway through their day, feeling fortified, he checked his messages.

Nothing.

But Sean’s silence continued to a giant, board spectrum antenna, searching for his signals. He knew it because Sean hadn’t blocked him. As long as he saw those checkmarks, he knew his pleas were reaching him. It was all he asked for.

_I miss watching you get dressed in the mornings,_ he texted now, while the tailor explained fabrics for suit linings to Alonso. _I miss the way your entire body blushes when you know I'm watching._

Momentarily looking up, he watched the tailor drape wide strips on Alonso’s arm. _I miss being your secret._ Encouraged Alonso to run a finger softly along each one. _I miss you being mine._

Alonso left LA a couple mornings later, straight from his condo to the airport. Kissing him as he still lay in bed, too early to rouse himself. Kissing him softly, curling his toes, making him keep his eyes closed, wanting.

“Adios, Holden,” Alonso whispered, crouched by his bedside. “You’re a wonderful person. You give so much of yourself. So openly and so freely. Thank you.”

And, for that morning, he felt absolved.

—

With Sasha it was romance. On discovery, his reflex was to go into near overkill. The automatic barrier that went up when Sean opened his heart with romantic gestures stayed down with Sasha. Out of something, he reciprocated, hard.

Sasha was from Ukraine, from farm country. Sean had mentioned farms where he was from, and while he had never been to Iowa, as Sasha spoke of the fields and sunsets he was homesick for, he heard Sean’s voice instead. As much as he wanted to see Sasha’s homeland, he had no desire to go home with anyone, so he asked Sasha where he dreamt of having a memorable romantic weekend, and Sasha said Bruges.

So they spent two nights in Bruges. For Sasha it was close to a spiritual experience. Having been a few times, this time he let Sasha be his guide. Sasha knew pretty much everything about the city a person could without having been, and experiencing the city with him reminded him of Sean's dedication finding balance in the scents and sounds of nature and things like that. He supposed romance really was its own system of experiencing reality.

Between giving him the personalized tour of the city’s art and architecture and buying flowers and chocolate covered waffles for little children playing on the cobbled streets, and sitting to kiss on stone walls under amber street lamps, he was satisfied that he had done for Sasha what he dared not for Sean.

_You call me beautiful,_ he texted Sean their last evening. _But that’s really what you are. Strong and beautiful and just perfect. And I’m sorry that I can’t be what you want._

He sent it, waited a minute, and sent another. _But I can be with you, Sean. I know you feel how much we miss each other. Don’t punish us because of me._

Inside their hotel room, Sasha wrapped his arms around his shoulders, around his neck, around his head, rubbing foreheads and kissing him. Sasha was to return to LA but he was headed to a meeting in London. When they broke their kiss Sasha just held him close, until he couldn’t help laughing self-consciously.

“Don’t you dare laugh,” Sasha said, still glued to him, his arms locked around him. “Thank you, Holden. I don’t know what I did to deserve this. And this is such great karma for that evil bitch Kieren.”

He laughed and got kissed again for it. “I’ll be sure to let him know,” he said, walking Sasha to the door and sending him off with a kiss to the cheek and thanks of his own.

Then he returned to the suite’s living room, where he’d left his phone plugged in all night and checked his messages. Nothing.

—

With Alex he had the closest sexual experience to being with Sean. Not in a way he would have seen coming. And at first, by no means comfortable. 

Yet from Alex, and then after to Quinn, a trajectory seemed to have created itself. Like an arrow shot that was taking him straight to a single destination. 

Across the table from Alex, he texted Sean. 

_Tell me what I need to do to make this better._

And watched it deliver. Alex, together tonight at a beautiful resort in Maui on a four-day weekend, dimmed his eyes at him. Returning a smile, he put away his phone.

“Sorry, had to get that.”

“No problem. You look so _solemn_ though. What’re you thinking?”

“I was thinking,” he said, softening his tone, “that I actually like how good a time we’re having.”

“Well, you make it so easy.”

He maintained his smile, somehow, and didn’t answer.

“You’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever met.”

“Thank you. But I'm pretty sure that means you should get out more.”

Alex glanced around, then coyly at him. “I think I’ve been out long enough for tonight. You?”

When they made love Alex was slow about it, as if memorizing every action, every movement of their bodies. When they made love, Alex would stare into his eyes, whisper the things that had startled him so much the first time. The things Sean was afraid to say. 

When he had only stared back, his eyes still and wide, Alex had not backed down.

“It’s not voodoo,” Alex had whispered. “Just roleplay. It’s no big deal. Just say it back, and relax and enjoy how it feels.”

Absolution once more. He hadn’t really known what Alex’s game was, but if it came with no strings attached then he could play. Forced himself to do as he was told, to relax and enjoy their play. 

Listening to the way he felt, to the sounds of his beating heart when Alex said those things, trying to understand why he couldn’t remain relaxed when Sean did this. How much easier it would make things between them. Trained himself now to find this calm when Sean did this. When Alex touched him, lowered his head to him, and whispered, _Tell me what you’re thinking,_ he gasped at the ceiling and out it came, all the things he’d wanted to say to Sean from the first day he met him. From the day he had seen stars fucking him, fallen deep into this mindlessness and perpetual want.

With Alex he did orgasm and see stars. And it wouldn’t be for another two years before he would let himself go near this place inside him again. The place to which he had banished this kind of sexual desire for Sean.

While Alex slept, he texted him.

_I miss making love to you. I miss the sounds you make when you’re about to come. I miss you falling asleep in my arms. Sean,_ he added. _Think about what you want in this life. What’s actually important._

—

Quinn wasn’t so much interested in travel or experiences around the globe, but rather wanted access to all the exclusive functions in town. That was easy enough. But Quinn too turned out unexpected, and too close to home.

Considerate and flawlessly mannered, Quinn was the proverbial perfect gentleman, and seemed born for the lifestyle he craved, apparently having taught himself everything he needed to succeed in the world he wished to enter.

Quinn was quiet and self-possessed, like Sean, listening more than talking. But Sean could converse with the best of them, while with Quinn conversation was obviously also a studied art, perhaps requiring more effort than Quinn was able or willing to give. Nevertheless it was good, and attending events with him gave him fleeting sensations that the one he wanted, who fit him like a glove, was attending the events with him.

The unexpected part was being alone with him, which was . . . kind of intimidating. Only because it felt like Quinn had x-ray vision. Like he could see his thoughts and maybe even the secrets he kept from himself.

While with Alex sex had physically felt like being with Sean, with Quinn it was like the metaphysical side of it arrived. Because it felt so different, so exclusive. And so felt much more intimate. Because they would lie together afterward and Quinn would be silent, warm, centered.

One evening afterward, side by side on the bed, Quinn had laughed shortly, quietly, almost to himself.

“What,” he’d asked him.

“Nothing really,” Quinn replied. “I just wonder who it is we have sex with when we’re in bed together. Because it’s certainly not me.” Stunned, he’d remained silent. But Quinn had merely looked over at him, a slight smile on his face. “It’s hot.”

After Quinn he called no one else.

—

Six weeks had passed with Sean silent.

Closing from work one evening after ending it with Quinn, a friend from a film production company in the building found herself stranded in the parking garage. 

Her ignition wasn’t starting and she was due at Pepperdine for a panel in twenty minutes. An Uber would take fifteen minutes just to navigate Century City rush hour, no matter how close, so he asked her to hop in. Breathlessly thanking him, they transferred her presentation materials, contained in several bulky leather briefs, into the trunk of his Lexus—“Jamila,” he cried, hauling them, “are you an assassin or something?” “Now’s not the time, Holden!”—and they were off in under a minute.

Hooking all the various briefs over her shoulder as she rushed toward the university campus building where the talk was being held—“Thanks Holden, thanks Holden, thanks, thanks!”—he was about leaving the campus grounds when, seeing a remote parking lot, he instead slowed. Another moment passed, and he pulled in.

Then sat in his car. For minutes. It was a lovely Pacific summer evening, the setting sun just sitting somewhere on the horizon. Four and a half months had passed since Sean broke up with him. _Four and a half months,_ he repeated to himself, feeling the words like the affliction they were. How was Sean doing this? He had counted each passing day. He had. And marveled that Sean could do it.

Now he looked at the emerald lawns, at the manicured walkways trailing college kids, and suddenly felt as if his heart were outside him, tapping to get his attention. Asking where on earth he had been for four months.

_Four months._ He ran a hand through his hair and let out a breath. He was suffering. He realized it now, sitting in his darkening car. And if he was, then so was Sean. If so, he had to be in the stronger position. 

The moment concluded with him pulling out his phone. Unlocking it, he pulled up Sean’s entry. Tapped it. Watched the screen light up like a lifeline.

Nothing happened.

It rang and rang and didn’t even trigger voicemail.

Disconnecting, he did it again, but this time immediately entered the code for Sean’s voicemail box.

“H-hi, Sean,” he said, as breathless as Jamila had been minutes before. He stopped and took a breath that still shook. “Hi.”

Closing his eyes, he sent the rest of what he had to say into the dark silence of the world inside his car. “Sean, I'm in Malibu.” Stopped, eyes closed, trying to catch his breath and not breath too hard into the phone like a stalker. “I’m . . . uh . . . I'm in your neighborhood. I can be there in ten minutes. If you want.” Eyes still closed, heart pounding, he was failing to relax, trying though he was to remind himself he’d committed no crimes, what was the big deal. “I miss you,” he said softly. “Why are we still doing this?”

Ending the call, he lowered the phone to his lap, staring at him. Determined to give it a couple minutes. Maybe . . . maybe Sean would reply. Instead Sean called him back.

Startled out of his mind, he grabbed the phone and sent it flipping out of his hands and onto his lap, then clattering to the floor of the car. Bent for it, he scrambled under his seat until the hard plastic was buzzing against his fingertips. Hauling it up, he stared at the screen to make sure he wasn’t seeing thing, then tapped to answer. “H-hello? Sean? H-hi. Hi.”

“What the _fuck_ do you think you’re doing?”

It had been so long since he’d heard his voice that at first he thought Sean had a cold. But it wasn’t a cold. This grinding, dusted-up voice was the pain Sean was feeling. “Is this really some kinda _fucking_ game to you?”

“No— no, of course not.” Holy God, this wasn’t how he had imagined finally getting this call. “Why— I'm not— I just thought— I wanted to come over and just say hi.”

“You mean you wanna _fuck,_ Holden. Your ass is in Malibu and you got an hour to kill, so you’re gonna call me up. Is that it?!”

“No, of course not.”

“How the fuck can you do this?” Sean said, his voice so ragged it was shaking.

“Sean—”

But Sean had disconnected.

His grip on his phone slackened, even before the backlight went off, leaving him holding a lifeless black piece of metal. 

He tossed it onto the passenger seat, then leaned forward until his forehead was pressed hard to the drivers wheel.

_Well done, Holden,_ he thought. _Weeks of meticulous, careful effort, undone in one super horny move._

—

Yet he was quite wrong.

*


	5. Breaking Me

“Well, of course, _no one’s_ going to tell me who should be dating _my_ son.”

Stopped at the dining table, he turned and looked at this mother. “So what’d you do?”

“I told him your father and I were divesting immediately and that he could take his stagnant backwater culture and burn it for all I cared.”

Turning back to the solid gold flatware currently displayed on her informal dining room table, surrounded by enough flowers and greenery to fill her gardens and certainly any inch of dining table not occupied by the gifts, he found himself mostly deprived of speech.

“And this was his response?”

His mother raised a hand like someone staving off a headache. “You know how they are.”

Actually, he didn’t. He’d never dated an Emirati. Or been the subject of a family feud with one’s father.

“So does this mean—” Stopped, just then thinking it, he turned and stared at this mother. “Wait— am I sold?”

His mother blinked at him, then broke into surprised peals of laughter. She laughed until tears were leaking from her eyes. And he started laughing as well.

“Well, am I?”

“No, darling. He wants you to _date_ his son, aren’t you listening. This is his way of apologizing for his semi-illiterate, entirely male, bullying approach to the subject. Obviously, it’s since sank in that no matter what _his_ people think about homosexuality, we certainly don’t give a fuck.”

Which was how he met Amir. His counterpart in pushy, entitled-parent victimhood. The person karma evidently needed him to meet before he could set foot inside the house on the Malibu cul-de-sac again.

Amir was from Abu Dhabi and lived in Heidelberg, where he’d escaped to the famous university for a residency as a pediatric surgeon and also for the express purpose of losing said parents. To neither of their surprise, they got along like wildfire.

Prior to leaving LA on a business trip to Europe, he’d had Arthur Railings produce a phone number on which to reach Amir, mainly to warn him that Cecelia Hadley-Wilson was on a warpath against his father, but also because he’d been a little curious to meet the target of Sheik Abdul Rahim’s plot.

They met one early morning for tea and coffee while he was stopped over in Frankfurt, and there he diplomatically transmitted his mother’s displeasure at the sheik’s moves. Amir had found the blowback funny, declaring it “the purchase of a jinn.” When he’d asked what that meant, he’d received a charming little Arabian tale, basically translating into biting off more than one could chew. He’d smiled, agreeing it was a pretty good description of what the sheik had done. And Amir had watched him smile, and soon after, he had fallen into a mental space with his counterpart which he couldn’t easily get out of. Not particularly because of anything Amir did, but because he came to realize the arrow had finally hit dead center.

On this path he’d taken, he seemed to have finally come face to face with himself.

Amir, to put it mildly, was anyone’s vision of completion. Beautiful in a way that only Middle Eastern men seemed to manage, the sheik’s son was cultured and mannered to the point of mesmerizing, speaking a handful of European languages, and some Japanese and Swahili, in addition to his own native Arabic, in which he could write original poetry in script. A philosopher-poet, Amir called himself, which he’d found heady and impressive until Amir self-deprecatingly explained that all men of Arabic descent thought themselves poets and philosophers. Amir also didn’t know in which direction a kitchen lay in any human habitation, openly admitting that he rarely even saw food in uncooked form. And that he had found particularly funny.

Amir was, ironically and quite hysterically, pretty much everything Cecelia would have destroyed worlds to give him. In lieu of that, he’d have to tell her she’d probably have to keep the flatware.

Now for the karmic part. Amir was also very wholesome—chaste, high-minded; awash with a need for a partner to love. Sound familiar? Based on those traits, he’d quickly concluded they were entirely dissimilar in what they wanted in life. A conclusion reached with relief. But not so fast. Born into strange ideas about family, like himself, Amir’s approach to a relationship was, ultimately, not that different from the sheik’s. And construed as Amir laid it out . . . not that different from his own.

That, he hadn’t seen coming either.

On spending time together, Amir was soon offering him anything and everything, in exchange for . . . well, _him._ Him with no strings attached.

Did _that_ sound familiar? He’d say so. But the true surprise was how completely uncomfortable he was with it. Unreal.

Whenever he visited, which was throughout the month of June, they stayed at the imperial Grand Hotel in Kronberg where Amir kept an apartment suite. Evenings they’d sit on the balcony and talk, and with Amir he did talk. It wasn’t hard. He felt they understood each other. Not just talk, he asked questions. They shared a deep sexual attraction, but Amir treated it like the foundation of something more rather than an end to itself.

One evening, having tea on the balcony, they talked. Actually, Amir had tea, he wasn’t ever passing up German chocolate given the opportunity.

Beyond a vista of vibrant greenery, turned gold and black under the lights of the castle grounds, the brighter lights of Kronberg lay beyond. The century-old hotel’s balconies were built for privacy, wood-beamed and draped with heavy brocade. Seated on the wide wood railing, his mug of hot chocolate beside him, Amir stood between his legs, an umpteenth glass of tea on the other side of them. He held Amir, kissing him on the mouth, by now no longer shying from the fact that he would probably always do this while imagining it was Sean. When he bit Amir’s lip, he knew he was sending the wrong signal. But wasn’t this the plan all along?

Long past his Pepperdine shock in getting slammed by Sean, he felt better, more himself each day, and he had to believe he was winning.

But touching Amir, holding him, he was missing Sean. His heartache was real, here to stay. One day it would diminish. What he wouldn’t give, nevertheless, to change the way the world worked right now. To have Sean like this—no questions, no further pressure in Sean’s eyes. How did Sean not want something so simple?

Head pressed to Amir’s chest, he held his waist, breathed softly, quietly.

“Why do you internalize so much?” Amir asked, tilting his head, attempting to see his face. “We understand each other I think.”

“Sure,” he replied quietly.

“Then what’s the problem? Why can’t we take things further?”

Closing his eyes, he breathed. Pushed back the reverb in his head that came in Sean’s frustrated voice. “Take them where, exactly?”

“Anywhere we want. For as long as we want. I think we are both happy to be what we are to each other. A _kept guy_ you called it, and say that in Western culture it’s a bad thing. But not to us. Not to most of the world. For you and me, it’s perfect. We see each other just as much as we want. And on the days we can’t stand the sight of one another, because you might one day rightly look at me and say I'm sick of Amir’s face, on those days we don’t even have to be on the same continent.” 

He couldn’t help smiling. Amir trailed a finger across his lips. “Sometimes when people force themselves onto rigid and narrow tracks, they break perfectly good things. You are too beautiful to be confined just to my bed. It doesn’t matter what I want. I would happily have you any way I could.” Amir’s finger had reached the middle of his lips. He parted them, biting down and stilling the roving finger. Amir caught his breath, breathing down on him. “Ruwhi, say yes.”

He said nothing. Irony at this stage was literally making the chocolate taste bitter in his mouth.

Amir was essentially, nearly word for word offering, and he was rejecting, what he himself was insisting Sean take.

He found that he didn’t like the taste. At all.

For Amir’s culture, it was an exact fit for a gay man—historically correct, logical and totally discreet. Hence the sheik’s proposal to Cecelia, bonus that their families were in business together. Early into initially meeting, he’d openly asked Amir whether he wasn’t expected to marry some princess and align houses or something. But apparently that didn’t apply, since it was no longer the twelfth century. Amir didn’t have to marry anyone, but he was expected to bring in more power and influence for his family, which was where he conveniently came in.

As thoughtful and compassionate as Amir was, Amir still thought such a thing made sense. They could love each other and satisfy their parents, who could bask in the feeling that they had snapped their fingers and conjured perfect partners for their heirs. To Amir, it was a solution as elegant as the poetry of mathematics, and therefore, Amir told him, “Perfect.”

It was as flawless a sales pitch as he had heard. And it did make sense.

But that year, _he_ didn’t make sense. Racked by a mind and body both drowning in wet hot impulses, yet fully self-aware.

So he knew enough to reject Amir’s offer.

Because being with him was a choice. And it didn’t feel that way with Sean. With Sean he was just trying to make the best of a rocky situation until they could both move on from each other. A compromise not meant to be celebrate or perpetrated.

Whereas what Amir was asking for was just as dysfunctional as any other type of long term relationship—locking partners into ugly dynamics when things went bad. No matter how easy Amir made it sound, any relationship was doomed to end and likely in failure. He just didn’t have what it took to knowingly usher years of pain and fights and disillusionment into someone’s life.

So, once again, he rejected Amir’s offer.

Amir kissed him, and leaving their mugs and tea glasses behind, led him from the balcony back into bed.

—

On the flight back to LA after his last night with Amir, he texted Sean. He hadn’t in a month. But he felt clear-eyed and much less desperate than at Pepperdine. Tonight he was closing the manual he’d been working with all summer and going with a gut feeling. One that told him that Sean’s incredible, extended silence, eight weeks now, contained everything it needed to for a break to come—Sean’s anger to his own pleas. Eight weeks of it, then serendipitously Amir, and he was going with his gut.

_Sean, call me. Let’s be together, even if for just once before you leave. Don’t tell me you don’t want it. I won’t believe you._

After the message delivered, he turned off his phone and went to sleep. Maybe after actually praying.

—

At the Marquis with Petey two nights later, he was listening to Petey badgering him to convince Elliot, whom they were waiting for, into quitting his job at Hesse Walsh to go work at the Geffen Foundation. Petey was saying that Elliot was overworked and underappreciated at the law firm—he doubted that—and badly needed a lifestyle change. Well, that much was known, but he’d been poking at that particular balloon with Elliot for years and it still wasn’t popping. Petey was insisting that Elliot just needed a concentrated attack of encouragement to jump ship.

Reclined on a sofa in the lounge, foot up on an ottoman, his head back and his eyes on the ceiling, he was barely listening since he’d heard this all before, no less from himself, and didn’t really need to hear anymore. But because Petey badgering anyone, when he wasn’t angry, was like a sweet gentle rain, he just enjoyed the feeling.

Draped on the sofa beside him and turned toward him, Petey had his hand on his arm, occasionally squeezing to ensure he had his attention. 

“Or,” Petey suddenly said, breath catching with excitement. “He could go work for your famil—”

“Don’t even say it.”

But Petey now had sparkles in his eyes, intoning, “Alastair would _looove_ that,” just as his phone, against his ribcage inside his jacket’s inner pocket, gave a long, hard buzz.

For the length of time it took for the sensation to pass, he actually thought it was Petey’s grip on him somehow buzzing him. Because it was the protracted, five-second buzz he had set for calls from Sean.

And that didn’t seem possible.

Barely moving, he slightly turned his head and looked down at his side. The buzzing had stopped.

Then it started over.

Disbelievingly, he moved slowly, reaching into his jacket pocket to extract the phone. But now he was staring at the lighted screen and seemingly suffering from a form of hysterical blindness because all he saw was a milky white screen. But as his vision cleared, he saw the name under which he’d saved Sean’s number glowing up at him.

He turned and stared at Petey, robbed of speech. 

Petey waved a hand. “Go,” he said magnanimously. “I’ll tell Elliot it was obviously the booty call you’ve been waiting all year for.”

He was already off the sofa and heading for the garden patio to find a quiet place to answer the call. At an alcove outside, tapping the answer button, he brought the phone tightly to his ear. “Sean, hi,” he said, closing his eyes, praying fervently that it wouldn’t be a version of Pepperdine.

Silence greeted his words.

Yet a soft exhale came over the connection, as if words were being blocked. He stared at the stone wall of the flower-choked alcove, listening to the light but audible breathing filling his head, his mind. This quiet sound that perpetually made his toes curl, like a physical touch, so much that his feet felt off the ground.

“Do you want me to come over?” he asked softly.

“Yes.”

Closing his eyes at the rough whisper, in a single breath he answered, “I’ll be there in thirty minutes,” and ended the call, heading straight for valet.

—

Sean’s driveway was dark, not even security lights coming on when he parked. The front door was also slightly ajar, but beyond it lay only a swatch of darkness.

Pushing open the front door as he entered, he still saw only darkness, having to walk farther into the house to see Sean standing in the cozy sitting area where they watched TV.

Sean had his back to him, facing the ocean, his fingers first to his temple, then on the bridge of his nose. The only source of lighting were candles burning, even the sound system being unusually silent. Only the surprisingly comforting sounds of surf and distant sea birds joined them. Dressed in charcoal joggers and a white workout T-shirt, Sean must have just finished aromatherapy.

It was strange what feelings tumbled through him at the sight of him. Or rather, which didn’t. Surprising how calm it felt being on this side of his feelings.

Of course he shouldn’t be frightened or confused by any of this. Why should he be? They _were_ just two people trying to navigate complicated feelings for each other. No big deal. He’d just needed space and time to see that.

Space to see that for however long their feelings for each other lasted, as long as he kept his head, he would get them through.

He’d done it. Cured himself.

Sean too had finally seen that. Seen, and evidently, understood.

Although aware of his presence, Sean still hadn’t moved. As though not quite ready to turn around and see him. Have him be real again in his life.

On his way over, he let his car keys drop to the floor, reached him and wrapped his arms around him so close he could smell the missed scents still lingering on his body. Setting his head against the back of his head, closing his eyes, he just held him, letting the sensations wash over him. Then, wanting even more of him, he brought his nose against the skin of his neck, brushing, breathing him. Feeling, cherishing the hard beating of the heart against his forearm. They _had_ worked for this. Placing a hand over Sean’s hurt, he felt its deep, sustained aching, dug his fingers around it.

Sean’s breathing shuddered, belaboring in response, but he just held him, waiting for everything to slow, to quiet. It did.

Slowly, he turned him around, looked at his eyes. Sean didn’t return his gaze, eyes downcast, his face flushed. He waited. By then he knew better than to make assumptions about Sean’s capitulations. Sean briefly glanced up, meeting his eyes, then lowered them. Then shifted as if to move away.

He stopped him, tightening his arms, better locking their bodies together. Sean stopped. Moving closer, he kissed beneath his jaw. Touched his tongue to his soft beard, gently pressed his hands to his upper back. Sean came to him, closer, until there was nothing between them but their hearts, their mouths.

Their world.

—

He was naked on top of Sean, who to him seemed even more naked, no stitch of clothing between them. Hand underneath him, he was grinding himself on him, no question leaving little red crescent welts on his ass. Alternately lowering himself flat on top of him to breathe against his face, upturned and in ecstasy, then propping himself to watch him. All of him soaked in sweat and plastered on him. Sean was gasping, grunting deep in his throat at the ceiling, his arms wrapped around him, his loges locked so tight around his he could barely move. All that needed to be moving between them was, and he was wet enough to have come many times over. But this wasn’t an imitation of the real thing. This wasn’t some other guy, with names he was already forgetting. This was the one, the only one, and his body was letting him know. He wouldn’t come just once, on Sean’s stomach in a minute and be done with it, there might be a couple more times tonight. He might have to wake up in the middle of the night and do it again. He might have to wake Sean to get his cock inside his mouth. Many things could happen tonight. All which would slowly chip at his self, in total defiance of a need to win and win always. But that was a problem for tomorrow.

Finally loosening his arms around him, Sean slid his hands to his ass, correcting him on what a tight hold felt like. When Sean, feet hooked around his ankles, spread him, he was coming so hard he couldn’t move. Sean held him, kissing deep into his mouth, kissing his face.

Done, his brain emptied. He laid, nearly dead, on top of him. Now Sean began moving, rolling his hips like in a dance, tipping him right over the edge the world.

Face turned to his, spilling his name over and over, Sean was sending pleas of love, of want, of possibilities. Nothing all year had felt better, sexier, more true. And in being let back, he had won.

—

In the morning he lay staring at Sean’s white ceiling as if he’d been up all night. Not feeling rested at all. Outside was the grey-blue ocean that had drowned him, this morning dispersed over by a mist light enough to not even be there. Profound in its large, surging silence. Yet as its captive, you didn’t have to see or hear it to know it was there.

Next to him on the bed, weighted warmer and deeper into him than he remembered, was the body he couldn’t get enough of. Wanted with a hunger that simply would not go away.

But staring at the ceiling, he could see himself—he _had_ walked away. Gone and found himself and now was no longer confused.

Beside him on the bed, Sean said, “This isn’t working for me.”

Slowly, he closed his eyes.

“You should go.”

“Go where?”

Silence.

Still staring at the ceiling, he said, “I’m always where I want to be, Sean. And right now I’m with you.”

Silence still.

Turning on his side, onto his elbow, he faced him. But he was staring at Sean’s profile since Sean too had his eyes on the ceiling. “I liked this,” he told him softly, helplessly getting hot again because the words seemed to be making Sean blush. “We should do it again.”

“You need to go.”

“I will.” But he didn’t yet. “But I wanna come back.”

“ _Get out,_ Holden.”

He got off him, retreating slowly to his side of the bed, but letting his knee shift between them as he did so and stopping at the juncture of Sean’s thighs. At Sean’s cock. Soft now, but still so warm. On his back, Sean couldn’t properly hide his reaction, a breath quietly sucked in and disappearing down his throat. It was helplessly satisfying.

But he didn’t need to be told again. Turning from him, he moved and sat on the edge of the bed. Faced the ocean and sky.

“Sean,” he said eventually. “It doesn’t have to be this way. I’ve been saying so for over a year now. Why are we always arguing when we could just _be_ together.” Lowering his head, staring at his hands, he said, “Why are you always complicating this?”

“What _the fuck_ would you know about complication?”

Shifting his gaze to the floor, he kept it there, maybe hoping a spot as low as possible would take him that much farther from Sean’s censure. Because he only had to turn and see, if he dared, exactly what Sean meant by that statement. But he didn’t have to. He respected the man in bed with him. Respected him enough to know without being told that Sean Jackson didn’t want to talk about being in the closet.

Their fight could have been much nastier. He knew this. Knew as with all their fights that all they were doing at the moment was skirting their individual weaknesses. Sean never called him what he knew was on Sean’s mind and he never voiced what he knew was Sean’s gut fear about their relationship—he wasn’t a heartless slut and Sean wasn’t losing out on true love because he was stuck in the closet. On their worst days they couldn’t have said those things to each other, because they knew none of it was true. Had they truly ever wanted to hurt each other, they certainly could have. But they had never wanted to.

Until his perilously maintained world came crashing down when Sean came out, they had never needed to. 

For that morning, he knew to just keep his head, maintain their progress. Finally turning, he looked at the impassive face behind him. “Call me any time you want,” he said. _I’m always yours._

Sean said nothing.

He got up, went into the bathroom, showered all by himself. It was early still, the usual time he could have expected kisses before the morning run. Instead he was being asked to leave. When he emerged, it was to find Sean gone. Downstairs using the pool shower, from the distant hiss. Showering without having first gone for the run. A desperate scrubbing of the sweat and anything else he’d done his best to brand him with.

Selfishly, he hoped no amount of vanilla soap could get his scent off him.

Soon however, it was inside his Lexus his was having his cheap, vindictive, but deeply satisfying thoughts.

 _God,_ he thought, pushing a hand into his hair. He was lost. His mind was gone. Why couldn’t he shake this entitled, addicted behavior. And why, why did Sean bring it out in him?

Eventually, he sat back, taking a breath.

Ultimately, he was okay. Sean was okay. It was just a day at a time.

He turned and started at Sean’s front door. One day they would even be able to stop seeing each other. Sean would move to another city with a new team and that would be that. Distanced, even during Sean’s offseason and no matter if they tried to sustain, life would pull them apart. And so with greetings only occasionally exchanged, and then with even less frequency, their attraction would cool. Simple, inevitable physics. Of course, for years to come Sean would hold a special place in his heart, and vice versa. But the result would be that they had both moved on.

Sitting in his car, frustrated and trying to cope that early morning, he had truly believed that. That they would survive their feelings for each other. In those days, he was sure that even Sean believed that. That they could one day be like two normal people with each other. It made sense, divorced couples did it for whole lifetimes, with his own parents as proof.

But of course he’d just been out of his mind. They had both been. What had been happening to them that summer had been too deep down for immediate capture and analysis.

That morning had been a turning point for them. After the kind of night they’d just spent together, he had in fact succeeded in breaking Sean to pieces. In exact quantities he could control, just as he had hoped all summer. The big giant snag being that all those already broken pieces of himself, carelessly scattered all over LA to the care of men who had no idea what any of it was about, were what he had used to cement all the pieces of Sean back up. After their night tearing at each other, with their hearts closed but with their eyes very much open, he had ensured that neither of them was a separate person anymore.

They were both whole and fine, but only because they had very unintentionally coalesced as a couple.

After Sean, he really could have returned to Stanford and taught a graduate class on something like “the participation of an unexamined subconscious on the prospects of success.” In a nutshell, _complete sabotage._

Nonetheless, imagining a future in which Sean had left LA for another city and meeting up entailed libido dampening things like securing booking confirmation numbers, he was able to take his eyes off the front door. Heart slowed, he brought his gaze back to his steering wheel, and when he looked around at the dead-quiet, dead-end street, he saw that the world was still the same. 

Soon he would be back in that world. Back answering Alastair’s probing questions, back watching everyone around him fake their way through feelings and hurts, declarations and posturings. What he felt here would be laughed at. Not just by his own parents, who would do much more than merely wonder what on earth he thought he was doing, but by pretty much every guy he knew. He couldn’t afford to be the only idiot he knew. 

Releasing a breath, he took a last look at the closed front door to his deeply hot, secret life. No more than he lived inside a fantasy sex chat room, he didn’t live here. 

Starting up his car, he listened to its familiar reassuring purr, then slowly backed out of the driveway. 

— 

He returned to the Westside. But now it was the start of July and he had squandered all of Sean’s offseason. 


	6. Listen

Given a choice of venue in which to finish telling Sean the secret side of their first three years together, he supposed he couldn’t have asked for a better outing than that evening. An annual art “experience” put on by the Annenberg Foundation in a Beverly Hills park. The night was among his favorite because of its art installations set up all over the park, requiring a walking tour and creating great opportunities to meet interesting people.

Also, because it featured gourmet cupcakes and ice cream. One year he’d gotten plenty of laughs from the organizers who wouldn’t tell him what the hell khajoor ice cream was and why it tasted so good. Imagine his surprise when one day, early in their relationship, Sean had made him ice cream that tasted a lot like it and he had stumbled over his speech to ask what it was and Sean had causally said, “Date powder. I don’t really use refined sugar. You mind?”

Among this year’s installations was one of a famous football player seated on a bench. Foot up, this time clad in electric blue sneakers, arm along the back of the bench, positioned beneath a sprawling mulberry tree. Eyes on the visitors milling around the sculptures in the lighted park, gaze shuttered. You couldn’t miss him.

Having gone for their gourmet goodies, along the way he’d met some acquaintances who lived there in Beverly Hills. It was a beautiful evening, the shop lights and car headlights from Wilshire Boulevard forming a long perimeter on one side, and Sean, in jeans and a deep red T-shirt— _Wisconsin Football_ printed on it in black felt—looking like a dream. Looking at Sean as he left, seeing the measured effort Sean was making to just hear him out, he again dug deep to smile and say he’d be right back. 

He’d never questioned that he was an optimist, he did see the world in clear light and positive potential, because really what did he have to complain about. But all one had to taste was real sadness, the kind that shaved the thinnest but most painful layers off the joy of life, to know the true answer to such a position. Double that when you were the cause of it.

Returning, friends and strangers stopped to congratulate him on his upcoming wedding, and in spite of the ache that had settled so deep, he was right there with them. He _was_ a lucky guy and did wish himself and his future husband all the happiness in the world. But who could snap a finger and guarantee such a thing? Even if Alastair, genuinely, he would have gone to his father on his knees. But at this point it was out of anyone’s hands but Sean’s.

Approaching Sean, he saw that an older couple had stopped by their bench. And recognized George and Victoria Hanson. Friends of his family and stalwart defenders of Darren’s mother Nicola Moran and her right to have married her son to him. Sean appeared to be responding politely while the Hansons introduced themselves, or perhaps reintroduced, since he was sure Sean had met them at his mother’s cocktails. The Hansons then immediately started looking around for him, as if afraid Sean had done something to cause his absence.

Failing to spot him, Victoria turned back to Sean with a clearly pointed question, the couple’s heads stuck forward to better hear Sean’s answer. He picked up his pace. 

Arrived even before Sean finished a drawn out, “Uhh . . .”

“Hi,” he said cordially, to everyone, startling the Hansons into turning around to look at him.

Instantly he saw all the questions in their eyes, all the prejudices and “concerns,” and since the last time he’d run into them had been with Nicola and there had been all that wrist wringing over Sean, he kept his expression devoid of any interest whatsoever. Eyes shining on his face, but realizing his expression, Victoria clenched her jaw and withheld whatever she’d meant to say to Sean, while George merely looked embarrassed.

“No one sees you at the Club anymore, Holden,” George said. “Stop by for dinner sometime.”

“Yeah, sure,” he said, still standing, still holding the cardboard tray of ice cream and cupcakes. 

George nodded, touched his wife’s elbow, who then knew to reel it in and follow her husband away, a terse, “We’ll see you later, Holden,” floating back at them.

Sitting down next to Sean, he set the cardboard tray between them.

“These suck, by the way,” he said, pointing at the tray so that Sean would take his eyes off the Hansons.

Sean glanced down at the tray but didn’t say anything.

Of course the food didn’t suck, but he had hoped Sean would at least give him a smile.

Tonight he was to complete his story. Tell of their transformative third year together. It would be the briefest part of his story, and their best. Their quietest and most wonderful, therefore what should have been relatively easy to tell.

But who wanted to be reminded of how much they had given up to achieve happiness. Obviously, not Sean.

*

At July ending he traveled to South East Asia, on a twelve-day inspection of some of the most beautiful waterside properties he had ever seen. Were he into being on the water, snorkeling, sea diving, shellfishing and the like, not to mention after the year to date he was having, he might have contemplated moving into one of the hotel suites on the shores of Vietnam. At least for a few weeks before he started missing LA again. Maybe he could have even convinced Craig to grab a suite with him, and Elliot could have stayed at home worrying that relocating might find him falling in love with a local and how would that work long distance.

Barefoot on a warm sandy beach in Da Nang, he was in small group of awkwardly smiling potential investors—two other chief executives and a banker—being taken on a stroll after a breakfast meeting. The awkward smiles were because the executives apparently hadn’t considered that seaside resorts might involve going down to the beach and had all had to roll up pants legs and remove socks and leather oxfords in favor of being given flip-flops by the resort’s management. Himself included. Not one of them had come down for breakfast properly dressed for the beach. He’d happily owned his mistake and forgone even the flip-flops. The water was of course perfectly lovely, clear blue, so no lurking sea monsters. They’d all since been strolling along, listening to their guide. But he’d been thinking about Malibu.

After that mess of a parting, he hadn’t called or texted Sean. If he wanted Sean to cool, call him before it was time to leave LA, he would have to give Sean the space.

Sean did call.

Except that he was in Kuala Lumpur when he saw his screen lighting up. Retreating into the men’s room from an impromptu party at one of the hotel’s lobby restaurant, he answered to Sean telling him to come over. Listening with an overflowing heart as Sean spoke from his own, almost audibly countering a common sense in rebellion.

“Don’t try to _talk_ to me about any of it when you get here,” Sean said. “Don’t try to convince me I’m doing the right thing, or tell me what I’m supposed to be doing. You get me, Holden?”

“Yeah,” he said quietly.

“I’ll see you when you get back.”

The very next day he was in Malibu.

It was exactly five days before Sean would be gone for the rest of the year. And when he entered Sean’s house and got caught in Sean’s distressed pulling and grabbing embrace, it was rough going, even for him. They didn’t fight, didn’t argue, didn’t even speak much. It wasn’t sunny and cozy, he didn’t share stories from his trip. Sean was withdrawn, conflicted and mixed up. While he abided by the rules under which he’d been let back in and mentally stayed out of Sean’s way. Their lovemaking was quiet, intense, protracted.

After Sean left, he actually stayed in the house a while longer. Walked around touching things. Separating had been like stripping paint off each other. “I’ll miss you,” he had whispered to him, holding him, pulled back so he could look at Sean’s downturned face. “Text me any time and we’ll talk on the phone. I’m yours, Sean. Always.” Sean had nodded, and he had kissed his temple.

To him, Sean had seemed okay. Adjusted to reality. Back then he couldn’t have imagined what it had taken for Sean, humiliated and trying to cope, to give him that simple nod. But looking out at the calm blue ocean, then around at the silent, peaceful house, he knew only one thing. And that was that he had won.

—

On leaving, Sean didn’t text him for over a month. But every Sunday night, he’d send one of his own. How was he doing? Hoping he was okay. LA missed him.

When Sean finally replied and began texting him again, it was September. By then he’d begun dating Neil.

“Remember when we’d talk those late nights in September, during the preseason?” On the bench next to him, Sean nodded. He was picking at his ice cream, feeling about as enthused for his cupcake. Sean hadn’t touched anything.

“Were you with someone?” Sean asked, and he nodded.

“Neil. From the Raven Fund gala,” he added, flatly. “Remember him?”

Sean didn’t answer. “How often?”

“Pretty much the entire time.”

Neil, for all his conceit, had been about as interesting as a rerun of an episode that was weak in the first place. But it was your show, so you watched anyway. Most nights he would call Sean from his study while Neil was upstairs asleep in his bedroom. 

A sound-wall of self-preservation had been the main feature of those early phone calls. Sean still withdrawn and unwilling to let him back in all the way. Picking up on it, he had kept their conversations nonsexual. Like talking with an old boyfriend he was still friends with. His evolution in justification for not being able to end it even though Sean was now gone. Even though he had been the one to insist to Sean that when he was gone from LA, they weren’t together. 

But there were no old boyfriends he remained friends with. Closed the door to his study, called up and talked into the night with. Waiting with bated breath to hear any of his answers. 

Keeping their conversation light and surface had also been a management tool to tamp his own sexual need. Having worked so hard all year to disperse his internal hurricane, he had by no means been eager to return to that state. But wow, could he feel it. Sean’s voice in his head, in the dark with his eyes closed, was like big, puffy dustings of powdered sugar. Requiring so much self-control not to simply stick his tongue out. But he didn’t. Just talked.

Then one evening after ending it with Neil, whom he’d dated for almost two months, he was driving back home from Elliot’s, heading west on Sunset through West Hollywood when he was suddenly staring at a giant billboard of Sean for an Under Armour campaign. Shirtless, dripping with sweat, and roaring out at traffic, with the phrase _Get your @#%! wrecked!_ printed in mammoth white letters behind him. Stopped at a red light, he stared at the image until he began feeling lightheaded.

That particular version of the print had only existed in West Hollywood. He knew it because he stopped at a street corner newsstand before reaching home and sure enough, Sean was featured on most of the sports magazine covers. He bought all of them.

At home, he showered, then sat on his bed with the magazines. Sean had not just interviews in them but ads in each one. Yet none featured the slogan on Sunset which seemed to have been selected specifically with him in mind. So there he sat staring at the color saturated ads, spread across his bed like soaking wet dreams. Like an addict stroking an addiction, he contemplate what he was about to do. Were he and Sean finally slowly moving toward something more platonic. Was going back to this place self-sabotage. But slowly, he fingered that leash. The one he’d spent all year fashioning for Sean. The one he didn’t understand until it was too late ran both ways. Right then it was pulled tight. Taut with his need.

He picked up the phone and called him.

Sean was that wall of big silence, mostly mumbled responses. But his own undertones were just as resonant, so that in a few short minutes Sean was conscious of the change in tone. “Do you miss me?” he asked him. And Sean went dead quiet. “Well, I miss you,” he continued. “You don’t have to say anything. I just want you to know that I miss us . . . together.” Staring at the magazine, he said a few more things, talking until he barely could anymore. Until it felt like they were both holding on to a life preserver against a huge undertow. Sean mostly listened, but the short responses coming over the phone seemed intentionally brief to cover Sean’s own state.

“This is Holden Wilson, by the way,” he said out of the blue, wanting a reaction. “I don’t think I said who was calling, and I just realized that you might actually just be really freaked out right now. But it’s Holden.”

Sean snorted, then did it again, and finally gave a brief, defenseless laugh.

And just like that, their dream-like door had opened once more, and he was back in his three-dimensional world.

Their conversations that fall were nothing like in their first year. Not much breeziness or lightness. That year they punctured all sorts of membranes, glimpsing the deeper areas of their sexual attraction, without the distraction of fighting and separating, noticing its shape a bit more. They never had phone sex. It wasn’t something he had ever done and it didn’t even occur to him to try. But it had been the faint strains of an orchestra prepping for an opening number, two years before the maestro stepped up and tapped the podium to begin a fuller exploration of his sexuality.

Those calls had left them both wrung out. Wrung out and him satisfied. While for Sean, having opened himself up again, that fall and winter were pretty bad times. Now when Sean’s texts came, they spoke candidly, clawing at his heart. Not every day, not even every week. But always simple and honest. _Can I call you tomorrow? It’s Tuesday, our day off, and I don’t want to go anywhere. I just want to talk to you. I want to do more than talk to you. What time should I call?_

At Christmastime that year, he got caught up in performing family obligations, joining his parents in attending traditional Bel Air family dinner parties. Occasions which, whether he fully admitted it or not, were always quite stabilizing. And perhaps, distance and feeling safe about it, he began thinking about what he’d started hearing in Sean’s voice.

—

Every New Year’s Elliot went to Sāo Paulo if he could manage it, and he joined him whenever he could. They always had a good time. 

Counting down to Sean’s return in January, for what would be their third year together, he had no butterflies. No vague tensions. He simply looked forward to being with him again, exactly like a kid with their hands on a still wrapped Christmas present. Spending New Year’s in Brazil was like getting handed that wrapped present. He hooked up with no one, not even interested enough to entertain the thought. It wasn’t anything like the previous year, with Craig and the Swarovski thing, or Istanbul. Still he just knew to keep a distance and not try to force anything.

The morning after New Year’s—they’d decided to stay on a couple more days—they sat eating breakfast on their suite balcony. Elliot was a super early riser and it was usually pretty awful, hearing him from all the way across a two-bedroom suite clinking about doing God only knew what. But it was a cool breezy morning in a new year, and he too was up. Elliot at the moment was having angst, wistfully saying as they ate that his New Year’s resolution was shaving an hour from each workday to relax more.

Saying nothing of his and Petey’s concerns, because Elliot would just get defensive, he made light of the topic instead. “No,” he countered pointedly. “What you need is to resolve to show more tolerance for guys who’re just trying to make a connection. When’d you get like this?”

“Get like what?”

“Like everything’s all— serious all the time. Most of these guys just wanna say hi, see where it goes.”

“And I have time for that.”

“Oh, don’t you? What, the Pentagon can’t spare you?”

Elliot didn’t rise to the bait, single-mindedly enjoying his guava crepes. “You know I don’t have your patience for this crap.”

Shaking his head to himself, he focused on eating his own breakfast. What was truly astounding was how oblivious Elliot was. They’d just spent days getting hit on by some very chill and hot South American men, and Elliot had been so dismissive and judgmental it hadn’t even been funny. Actually, it kinda had been, listening to Elliot being judgey in Spanish and totally failing to get how sexy that was.

“It’s great practice,” he told him.

“What is?”

“Dating.”

“For what exactly?”

“For when you fall in love.”

Elliot looked at him, cutting off laughter as if he’d just made an unexpectedly funny joke. “That is _not_ why you have ‘em stacked sky high.”

“ _I’m_ not trying to fall in love.”

“Am _I_ trying to fall in love?”

“Well, you’re trying to avoid it. And I guess things like working late helps.”

“Holden, you work later than I do.”

“Maybe twice a week. And at this point you’re just dodging the topic.”

“Then stop talking about it already.” Elliot then fell silent. Then, “So it honestly doesn’t scare you that one of these days some guy is gonna have you by the short hairs.”

He shrugged. “That’s why I use hair removing cream down there.”

Elliot looked at him, then burst into laughter, pressing a hand to his mouth and, eyes on him, shaking his head.

He met his eyes and smiled at this best friend. “Happy New Year, handsome.” he told him. “This year, do what’s right.”

—

“So what’s yours?”

Turning to look at Elliot in the Virgin Air waiting lounge, he asked, “What’s my what?”

“Your new year’s resolution.”

Elliot was reading a book he’d just bought in one of the bookstores, slouched low in the leather seat with his eyes on the pages. And so missed his slight hesitation. “I don’t know,” he said, lowering his gaze, shaking his head. “I can’t remember the last time I made one.”

“Well,” Elliot said, turning the page. “You could always make a resolution to talk to _more_ random strangers you meet this year. Buy more of them books in airport bookstores, or failing that, resolve to give away even more of your business class tickets.”

He smiled, nodding. “Not a bad resolution at all.”

In fact, he _had_ been thinking about a particular one ever since the new year dawned. And while Elliot disappeared into his book, and throughout the flight back, he went over what he had decided to do this year about Sean Jackson. 

It wouldn’t be for weeks after Sean’s return that he would connect his sudden need to do right by Sean with the . . . thing he’d been hearing in Sean’s voice since well before Christmas. At the time, it had simply felt like an honest, next step.

He had resolved to stop fighting Sean. There was no longer any need. Sean had already been signaling for some time now that he got it, accepted it—there was no commitment, formal or informal, happening between them—and that he could live with it. That given room, he could find his own way to be with him. So he too needed to accept that even if he couldn’t bring himself to call what they had a long term relationship, then he could call it a medium term relationship or whatever else he wanted to. But he needed to let go of his resentment over not being able to walk away. Sean already had a special place in his heart, and for his own peace of mind he needed to give it its due.

Where Sean was concerned, he was fortunate anyway. It could have been much worse. He could have found himself emotionally entangled with a guy who could cause him real life problems. Wanting to be a trophy boyfriend, for instance. Because even in the closet, Sean could have still pulled some craziness. If straight men could basically try to date him for serious access, without the sex and calling it being close buddies, then Sean too had things he could have attempted. Yet Sean had no interest in any of that. Sean had only ever just wanted to be with him.

Most important of all, Sean was always, always, real with him. Whatever their differences or frustrations, no matter that sex often complicated things, he and Sean were, without question, lifelong best friends. With all the rough honesty and difficulty and unfailing support that meant. They had achieved that together. This year, therefore, he was going to stop putting the burden of his own shortcomings on Sean.

They landed at LAX with his resolution on his mind.

—

Then Sean was back, fused head to toe with him by the front door, his hands raking the back of his head, up the back of his jacket, electrifying him to the point of sending shivers down everywhere, his heart doing sky dives. His tipped his head back, getting kissed all along his neck to within an inch of his life. _It’s because he’s not out. That’s why it’s so hot. It has to be._ The entire world shrunk only to sounds; their trembling breaths, soft panting, whispers swallowed into each other’s mouths.

There by the front door they undressed each other, first Sean because it was easier, sexier to him. Then he waited while Sean got every scarp of clothing off him. Sean somehow did it like performance art, sliding his tie from neck the same time he did it to his belt. His vest and jacket were already on the floor, none of which he remembered happening, then the buttons on his shirt were separating like being unzipped. Now his shirt was down his arms, locking them in place while Sean ran his hands over his body, touching him all over and making him physically hungry. 

Then down Sean went, kissing down his body, pulling his trousers and boxers down, getting them off with his boots. Then the back of his thighs, getting so warm from Sean’s hands smoothing over them he could have come, as Sean lifted his leg over his shoulder. Then he was leaning back against the wall, fingers buried in Sean’s hair, working his cock into Sean’s hot mouth. Stealing a look down, trying to keep his vision from blurring, blinking at the dark blond hair, at the mouth he wanted to kiss. Sean’s grip on his thighs squeezed. It was going to be perfect when he came. Then he tightened all over, moaning, started coming.

The glaze on his sight slowly cleared. His mind slowly reconfigured. Sean moved, and now he was looking at the side of Sean Jackson’s head, against his own, as if he never left. Feeling him back to kissing his neck, feeling his arms locked around him. Sean was home. He closed his eyes.

—

Sean ordered delivery and they had dinner in the cozy TV area. Showered, in sweats and nothing else. In the darkened house, he was talking, no memory what about. Maybe mostly to banish the image he kept seeing of Sean standing in that very space, trying not to turn and see him. Nevertheless he stopped talking on noticing that Sean who was on an ottoman in front of him and cradling his legs, had long since fallen silent and was staring, kinda hardcore, at him. He stared back at him for a moment, then asked.

“What’re you looking at?”

“You’re cuter than I remember.”

He continued staring at him. “Well, that’s weird,” he said softly. “You’re exactly as hot as I remember.”

Sean smiled. Slowly, thoughtfully, poking at his takeout. “That _is_ weird.”

“Does that mean one of us is . . . not who they appear to be?”

Sean snorted, seeming preoccupied, before setting aside his sushi and coming to him. Squeezing himself onto the sofa with him.

They were both about a foot too long for the thing, their feet dangling off one end, touching, rubbing. Helplessly laughing as they tried to make themselves fit, he complained that he’d been telling him for three years now to get rid of this piece of minimalist theatrics, which only got Sean slowing down to stare at him some more. “Did I get my math wrong?” he asked, and Sean’s eyes dropped to his mouth, then back to his eyes. And he realized Sean was for some reason taking him in as if memorizing his features. So he just watched him, waiting for him to speak.

“I’m sorry about last year, Holden. That we fought so much.”

“God, no, don’t apologize. We just needed some time to see . . . how we fit together. And I think we found it.” But he kept his eyes on him, wondering why this year the tension between them was so much less . . . threatening. Had he known it would be like this?

Yeah, he had. It was what Sean had been signaling all season over the phone. Something Sean might not be able to vocalize but which was clear in his eyes, in his actions. In his tone. Sean had made a choice to live with what they had. 

He had made the right call on his resolution. They were in sync now. They would be happy this year.

On his back staring into Sean’s eyes, he watched as Sean smoothed his hand across his torso, grazing a thumb over his nipple and sending sparks straight to his cock. Sean lowered his head, kissed him where his thumb waited, slipping a hand under his back as he arched into his mouth. He blinked, gasped up at the ceiling. 

Then he was looking up at Sean again, who had slowly lifted his head and was staring at him. Apparently, he had just said something. But he had no idea what it was. And he didn’t think he wanted to ask.

Sean suddenly gave him a ravishing, stunning, shy smile. Like he hadn’t seen since their first dates. “Thank you,” Sean said.

“My pleasure,” he replied, and started laughing.

—

It was a perfect offseason. And everything that _didn’t_ happen, proved it.

They didn’t counter each other when he left for Valentine’s Day, though this year it was a perviously scheduled business trip.

Neither did Sean so much as tense up when it was time for him to return to the Westside for a while.

He did it because he believed doing so maintained their hard won status quo. And Sean only said okay, held him, kissed him for a long time in the shower, as if kissing goodbye a partner who had extended travel coming up. It was so sweet and so sexy, a true feeling that they were on the same side.

Three times he left for the Westside that spring and summer, averaging just about two weeks before he hurried back to him. Back picking up as if he had in fact just traveled for a time.

All through that offseason they didn’t break up at all. Not once. Not even a fight. And January to July, even when he left, he dated no one else.

No one at all.

That offseason he gave Sean all the love and kindness he had in him, and pulled any ounce from anywhere else he could. It was a beautiful, exquisite year. The year they saw each other clearly, with no lenses of distortion.

They had done it—achieved balance. They were going to live like this for years to come. With patience and determination, he had avoided the mess and delusions of so-called commitments and long term relationships. He was happy for himself, but truthfully, and much deeper down than he visited, he was happy for Sean. Unvisited, because otherwise he would have asked himself why he’d be happier for Sean than even for himself. When supposedly, everything he was doing was for his own comfort and happiness.

But of course, all that balance and perfection had been nothing but a lovely respite. A calm before the storm inside them both finally broke.

—

All of July they were together, him having taken a week off work at the end of the month so they could focus serious time on cleaning out Sean’s oils and candles collection.

Back then he’d still been dodging knowing anything about Sean’s career, anything about his contractual obligations with the Chargers, offseason schedules and publicity and image management. His home stash of magazines were a personal matter, past which he didn’t want to familiarize himself with the events and meetings and interviews and photoshoots Sean seemed to spend his days and evenings finding ways to ditch. 

To him Sean’s offseason suffering was ridiculous, reminding him of the anguished meltdowns Petey’s famous Hollywood actor friends would have over publicity schedules, even though Petey perpetually and in the most brittle of tones assured him that fourteen-hour photo sessions and media interviews were real and valid pains.

But, he had decided he could get involved in throwing out scented candles.

During that last week of July, then, he yea’d and nay’d on scents that would make it into their fourth year together as . . . friends who loved each other and also couldn’t keep their hands off each other. And while Sean patiently put bottles and candles aside, Sean’s left for yes, right for no, he watched him, observing the oh-so-very slight change that seemed to have permanently moved in. The quiet, centered, self-assured, yet somehow insecure man he had first met and dated, to the angry, frustrated lover inside, defiant and determined to hold his own ground no matter how small, now to this man who looked at him and spoke to him with . . . what?

What, really, was it? 

What was going on with the man seated cross-legged opposite him. True acceptance of them?

He had never had any difficulty living in the moment. In that moment before the open bedroom sliding doors, sea breezes swirling in across the smooth stone patio floor, cooling them in the afternoon air. In that moment, therefore, he loved. He loved. Said yea to the secret life that wasn’t supposed to exist for him.

Still, something was going on with Sean.

*


	7. Third Year

When Sean left that their third year, he was left feeling that a hole had been stamped into his chest. With no desire to hang around Sean’s house like last year, he drove that Sunday evening straight from Malibu to Bel Air.

His dad was out jogging, and after verifying that Beau’s BMW was nowhere in sight, he parked and went into the kitchen where he found Alvarez, about closing up for the day, stocking the fridge with late evening and midnight raid type foods. And asking, as he settled into a cushioned kitchen chair, whether he was staying the night.

Stretched out, ankles crossed, eyes on the ceiling, he shook his head. Then he closed his eyes and relaxed. Soon, he hadn’t done much for almost an hour beyond listening to Alvarez catching him up on hysterical “little cousin” stories. Sometimes laughing, sometimes simply letting Alvarez’s voice, occasionally interrupted in Spanish instructing other staff, wash over him. 

Mostly, just letting his mind come down from the high that had been the last six months.

_He’s gone. Again._

Then, _What is this? Is this the rest of my life?_

He stayed until the light was gone outside, until his dad returned, hearing the conversation from the kitchen and coming in to join them. Eyes still closed, he remembered thinking that his dad had come over, bent and kissed his forehead. And actually opening his eyes because he was so sure it had happened. And why would his dad do that. What was he suspecting.

Eyes open, to his slight surprise he realized he must have fallen asleep and been dreaming. His dad was across the kitchen at the fridge getting a post-run sports drink. Saying “Hi, son,” but nowhere near him.

A month later, he began dating Foley. Sweet, gentle, caring Foley, what his heart had needed like medication. Foley had been in love with him. He knew that now. And maybe even then. But it had been ultimately invisible to him. There was only one, and he had once more left him.

—

When they had finally fought the following Valentine’s Day, nearly as fast as in their terrible second year, he had known that was it. That it would be their final breakup.

All fall and winter the thing in Sean’s voice had persisted. And physically distanced, no level of New Year’s resolution could massage it into submission. It worried him that he couldn’t seem to name it. Until he suddenly could. 

Nothing brought it on, nothing Sean said or didn’t say. But suddenly he knew that, quite simply, Sean was running out of what it took to continue.

Knew it, but like Sean’s tone itself, couldn’t articulate it, not even to himself. 

That season he made no self-satisfying phone calls. When they talked it was real, mundane. Another natural stage attained in which they just wanted to hear each other’s voices, undress each other, check that everything was okay, that there were no emotional bruises; was he resting well after training, how were the physios anyway, and could he actually get fresh organic vegetables delivered biweekly like in Malibu. To that last one, Sean had chuckled. “San Diego’s still in Southern California, sweetheart.” Okay, well, _he_ didn’t know. It was all rocky shore down there, could they even grow anything. Sean had laughed, brief and quiet.

And he had sensed him straining to do it.

Ultimately, however, the fall and winter were a continuation of the year so far. So he told himself it was really just a part of Sean settling into their wonderful new groove.

That in January, starting their fourth year, they’d be looking at the start of a brand new, emotionally stable, mutually comfortable future.

Sure as the sunrise.

Yet, he had known.

He had known that if somehow, things went wrong and he was asked to leave again, that if he left, he would have to find a way to leave and never come back. He would have to leave Sean the hell alone.

It was the shark trawling the waters of his unconscious since before New Year’s.

It was the reason he called Sean Mr. Straight Quarterback of the year when, at last, Sean did run out of sufferance, and that shark burst out of the water.

It was an insult he had had to reach far outside of himself to grab. Finally and desperately, when he had known that here was the confrontation from which there was no escaping. 

He, Holden Wilson, had traveled well past recognizable terrain in terms of what he accepted as a relationship for himself, and Sean had apparently done the same. 

With nothing left to lose in challenging him, Sean had simply moved past any emotional boogeyman. The spectre of Alastair and Cecelia’s fights and of his own frightened and confused teenage self were at last powerless in Sean Jackson’s house.

Was he in or was he out?

He was out.

*

When he left that final time, Sean sent him a text he had never seen before. _Don’t bother coming back._

He had been prepared for it. Still it was impossible to describe how seeing it had felt.

He had ended their life together.

On leaving for Leipzig days later, he did so prepared to return and stick to his decision. To cope however and handle whatever emotional fallout. Despite their harsh words in breaking up, the place they had reached the year before had been real. Before their fight that early February, things had been as good. So he would return, and they would be less angry and more rational with each other. Of course they could never have worked. In fact they had survived longer than probably either of them had expected. So they would help each other begin to head for that place where they could accept things—that though it ultimately hadn’t worked, they could remain lifelong friends. Maybe even begin laying the foundation for when they would spend time together in that new city in Sean’s future. Meeting up until they were old men.

In his gross naiveté of how relationships or even people worked, he had believed something so stupid. That even if Sean never came out of the closet that Sean would remain single and free and available for him to call up the rest of his life.

Anyway. It was their final breakup. He would find a way to live with it.

Instead Sean had gone and come out of the closet.

He hadn’t expected to cry. Why would he? Hadn’t he just laid out plans for what he’d do after returning from Leipzig? Crying hadn’t figured into any part. How many times had he been ready to tell Sean that a line of men waited to make him happy. When he had started crying instead, trying to vocalize the very thing, he knew he was as fucked as fucked got.

Knew it because all those emotions he had spent half a year supposedly getting under control were ravaging him. Knew it because the world outside Sean’s door already seemed dull and empty. A future of this? Knew it well before he broke and called Sean a month and a half later.

For the first three weeks after Sean’s press conference, all the tabs on his browsers had stayed pinned on any site that had been following Sean’s coming out. Which was all of them. He felt as stunned as a perfect stranger, stunned as if he didn’t know the guy at all, stunned like he had woken up thinking it was a Sunday when in fact it was the following Friday and he had somehow missed a whole week.

But then he took a breath, closed his tabs and stopped doing it. Continued reacting like everyone else to the news though—able to smile at Petey’s screaming excitement, at Elliot’s genuine sexual interest on seeing Sean’s image for the first time, a condition he sincerely wished persisted, instead of the impatience and intolerance Elliot had since developed toward Sean on knowing, or rather assuming, the details of their relationship, and Craig’s mild surprise. By and large, he’d shown just enough interest as a gay man, not to mention rights philanthropist, at such news—“Yeah, it’s pretty great.”— to not look out of place.

Doing it until he began feeling less stunned, more of a blankness he didn’t know what to do with.

Everything was different now, he realized. Although he had never actually factored Sean being in the closet into their relationship, things did feel different. The idea of seeing him again made him feel . . . sunnier, somehow. Lighter. Excited like on the first day of a new year in school. You knew everyone down to their most prominent habits, yet some kids were going to show up looking very different than you remembered. And when he did see Sean, shining again, that day in Paula’s backyard, Jesus Christ.

Life really was a weird thing that could use sticky labeling. He’d been so—sorta kinda—sure that on conquering his own fears and saying yes to this new Sean, who so gently, so compassionately, accepted him for who he was, so humanely offering to show him the ropes, he’d also said yes to solving their problems.

 _He’d_ always been their problem, right? And now he knew himself. Right?

Only on taking Sean home the summer they got engaged, and getting to see Sean in the context of his family and himself, did he truly know the problem. 

Fragments that were himself, assuming to be him.

It all ended where it started: with Ian.

Awareness not being understanding, he’d always been aware of the trajectory his personal life had taken over the conversation with his father. But it hadn’t been until last summer, telling Sean about Ian, that he actually understood what the conversation had effected. That it had taken him off-track on himself. So that it had taken this long, and this many mistakes, for him to simply accept himself.

He could almost hear Amir laughing. But after a number of needlessly rough cocktails at his mother’s, it had boiled down to the simple realization that he was a person on his own and that no one else could set his identity. And that he had fallen in love and had needed to find the humility to accept that it had happened to him.

*

There was his story. Where all those men fit in, where Sean fit in.

Told as honestly as he could manage. Which as he’d been often told, was pretty honest.

Tonight it hadn’t taken that long to finish. Their ice creams were just starting to melt.

Seated as when he’d started, Sean was staring into the dark green lighted park. 

Breezes rustled up little whispers in the trees, then died.

LED flashes came in their direction as often as at the artwork around them.

Not looking at him, Sean said, “Holden, I wanna ask you something.”

He was looking at Sean, facing him, his leg bent on the bench. Halfheartedly, eating his ice cream. 

His heart had only sped up a little. Protected slightly by the small truth that their third year hadn’t been so bad. By default, therefore, whatever question Sean had worked himself up to ask wouldn’t be about the worst things. Those would come later.

“Ask me anything,” he said.

“I wanna know whether you thought we were exclusive.”

“One hundred percent,” he said without hesitation. “You were actually the only one I was exclusive with. I know it . . . sounds a little crazy. But believe me, you were.”

It wasn’t clear whether Sean did. Sean only listened without comment.

*

At the park’s entrance, Petey waited with the car. These days Petey looked as nervously at Sean as he felt. As they reached the car, a small cluster of women stood nearby, surging forward as Sean neared them. They wore Chargers T-shirts and had on baseball hats, and soon Sean was signing their hats, taking pictures with them.

He hung back, pretending to check his phone. Tonight was the last of it. He wanted more than anything to follow Sean home, what he’d been doing whenever Sean's body language permitted. But tonight he wasn’t going to put Sean in a position to have to make a decision. He was going to just give him space. Unsure right from the start whether he should, he’d finally had to do some research online, on whether to continue physical intimacy during a period like this. Whether it wasn’t self-serving and manipulative. It wasn’t apparently, most articles advising what his instinct had been, to stick close.

But his instinct tonight was also telling him that this particular issue was too large. That he had exhausted any and all entitlements. That he needed to go home.

Go home and be with his embarrassment. And to, finally, face his own shame.

*

At home, though, he first called up Kay and Allison. He wanted to hear their voices, but more than that he wanted to speak to Sean’s niece.

 _His_ niece.

Suddenly he felt the need like a physical pain in his chest, to hear her sweet voice and see the stars in her eyes when she looked at him. The mysterious, fascinating conduit to her uncle. And when she pinned her always slightly widened gaze on him and started asking questions, breath locked inside her and awaiting his sure to be interesting and equally mysterious answers, eyes occasionally wandering beyond his shoulder as if Sean would suddenly appear there, he felt like a person. A good, whole person.

Tonight she didn’t let him down. Seven and a half now, she sat by herself in the chair and stared into the laptop as if he were really in there. A big, wide smile on her face. “Hi, Holden,” she said in delight. “Where are you?”

“In LA.”

She perked up. “With Sean?” He nodded, and she sighed. “I misssss you. When are you coming to see me?”

“Soon,” he promised, around his squeezing heart, hardly believing his eyes were stinging. But this was why he had called.

Somehow he held out. Until about a week and a half from then. 

After Sean had been out a couple of times with Craig. And Cecelia had called up her future son-in-law. And Sean returned to give him his response to his story. And then he lost it and cried.

*


End file.
